January 2011

146,000 tons of poison gas…

During World War II, America built a stockpile of chemical weapons twice the size of Germany’s and twenty times greater than Japan’s. As the war dragged on and old concepts of military morality eroded, more and more leaders began calling for chemical warfare against the Axis powers. But somehow it never happened. In an absorbing and newly documented study, the historian Barton J. Bernstein reveals why, in a conflict that gave rise to Auschwitz and the A-bomb, no nation could bring itself to use poison gas in the field.

Mailed from Tokyo Bay…

We mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War with a most unusual pair of letters from a young Navy man to his wife back home. Vernon C. Squires was one of the first to sail into Tokyo Bay with the great flotilla that received the surrender of Imperial Japan, and his eloquent, perceptive account is as fresh now as when he wrote it.

Fighting in Nicaragua…

Dr. Gwilyn B. Lewis’s letter on “Holmes on Anesthesia” (February/March 1985) was overly optimistic about Holmes’s term going unchallenged “until the end of time.” In 1957 a number of anesthesiologists, recognizing that modern anesthesiology dealt with more than just insensibility to touch, tried to have the name changed to nothria . This might be translated as “torpor” or “sluggishness” and thus include all the states of insensibility—pre-, intra-, and post-surgical —which members of that branch of the profession induce.

The effort failed because the meaning of the Greek word nothria was shown on investigation by a classical scholar to include also “post-coital languor.” Also, the modern Greek nothria is used for stupidity and dullness. Except for that research, Holmes’s terminology might have been superseded, and “the tongues of every civilized race of mankind” might have spoken of nothria and nothrotist .

I was a seventeen-year-old quartermaster aboard LST 515 (“What Happened Off Devon,” February/March 1985), which was skippered by Lt. John Doyle and carried the flag of Comdr. B. J. Skahill. I was transferred to a land-based amphibious group shortly before Convoy T-4 sailed to disaster in Lyme Bay.

My duties aboard LST 515 were on the bridge, so I had observed the everpresent tension between Doyle and Skahill. There is always tension between the captain of a vessel and the flag officer of the squadron, because, though the safety of the ship is the responsibility of the captain, he is at the same time outranked by the flag officer. To show his independence, Lieutenant Doyle often would contest Commander Skahill’s suggestions, though always when Doyle was within his rights as captain to do so. So I’m not at all surprised that Lieutenant Doyle ignored Commander Skahill’s order not to return to the area of the sinkings.

1785 Two Hundred Years Ago 1835 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1860 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago 1885 One Hundred Years Ago 1910 Seventy-five Years Ago

In June of 1785, James Madison ensconced himself in his library in Orange County, Virginia, and wrote “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments.” His aim was to rally opposition against a bill that would impose on the people “a moderate tax or contribution annually,” first defined as being “for the support of the Christian religion or of some Christian church, denomination or communion of Christians.” In a later version of the bill, teachers of the Christian religion were identified as the beneficiaries of the tax. In either case, Madison feared the bill’s “dishonorable principle and dangerous tendency.” He stood alone against its many backers, who claimed their object was to halt moral decay. In fact, they were spurred on by the powerful Episcopalian Church, which hankered after state moneys.

After ruling for thirty-four years as chief justice of the United States, John Marshall died in Philadelphia on July 6 of a liver ailment. When appointed to the post by President John Adams in 1801, Marshall seemed an unlikely candidate, despite his political career; although once a practicing lawyer, he had studied law for only six weeks. Yet after Marshall was named chief justice, his genius soon became apparent. He molded the Supreme Court into a prestigious and powerful body, and his decisions set forth the basic principles by which the Constitution is interpreted.

“There fell to Marshall perhaps the greatest place that was filled by a judge,” said Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes a century later, “but when I consider his might, his justice, and his wisdom, I do fully believe that if American law were to be represented by a single figure, sceptic and worshipper alike would agree that the figure could be only one alone, and that one John Marshall.”

It is said that the Liberty Bell cracked while tolling Marshall’s death.

“A dollar book for a Dime!!” ran the June 7 advertisement in the New York Tribune . “128 pages complete, only Ten Cents!!! BEADLE’S DIME NOVELS NO. 1, MALAESKA : Indian Wife of the White Hunter, By Mrs. Ann S. Stephens.” With this inauguration of their dime novel series, Irwin P. Beadle & Co. became the first book publishers to tap the American mass market—a market only recently made possible by a paperback revolution in 1842 and the advent of cheaper printing processes. They made a fortune. Turning out one title after another, their novels soon developed recognizable characteristics: high suspense and rip-roaring action, often marked by bloodshed but never by immoral behavior; characters who used bold language but refrained from profanity, never drank, and were utterly asexual; and plots in which virtue prevailed and the forces of evil were inevitably overcome.

Beloved of San Franciscans for more than a century now, the sturdy cable cars cling tenaciously to the hills of their birth. They are fiercely protected as one of the crown jewels of Bay Area tourism—a columnist in the Chronicle once went so far as to say that, without them, San Francisco would only be a lumpy Los Angeles—but they are a good deal more than that.

A triumph of 19th-century American mechanical ingenuity, the cables were the first form of urban transportation that enjoyed any real success in displacing the animal-powered street railways that had dominated municipal transport for nearly fifty years.

Since the cars have survived only in San Francisco, many people assume the system was unique to that perpendicular city. But, in fact, cable traction spread throughout the country. Here is a list of the other cities that operated cable roads, the names and dates of the individual companies, and the approximate total mileage of track.