January 2011

The Colorado farmer opened the barn door for me. There, hanging from a nail on the back wall, was an empty 35-mm reel. With that excitement peculiar to collectors, I asked if there were any films left. “I reckon so. Since maybe 60 years ago, when my daddy give up his road showin’.”

There were eight deeply rusted 35-mm film cans draped with cobwebs. I pried them open. The first films looked wonderful. Holding frames over a flashlight showed them to be—what else?—early Westerns. But the seventh can felt too light, as though the film might have disintegrated to brown powder. I carried it outdoors and opened it gingerly. There was no film—instead, glass lantern slides.

Colonel Herman Haupt was very tired and very angry. On this night of August 22, 1862, the second battle of Bull Run was shaping up nearby, General Pope needed troops, and it was up to Haupt, who had command of every U.S. military railroad in the Eastern theater, to see that he got them. Four trains had simply disappeared. Haupt fumed and worried until midnight, when a conductor arrived with word that Gen. Samuel Sturgis had seized them.

Douglas A. Fraser is unusual among American union leaders of this generation. He started out as a worker, not as a professional union man, during that fervid time of union organization, the Great Depression, and witnessed the founding of his own union. When Fraser retired from the presidency of the United Automobile Workers in 1983, it marked the end of an epoch in the UAW and in American trade unionism. Almost alone among modern union leaders, Fraser knew first-hand what working was like before the union and what it was like after.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, on December 18. 1916, Fraser came to this country with his parents in 1922. He attended public elementary schools in Detroit and then Chadsey High School, but he did not graduate. As the Depression was closing in on his family, on Detroit and the country, he took that classic American step: he went to work in the factory.

1785 Two Hundred Years Ago 1885 One Hundred Years Ago 1960 Twenty-five Years Ago

On February 24 Congress appointed John Adams to be the new nation’s first minister to its late enemy, Britain. Two weeks later, on March 10, Thomas Jefferson was named minister to France.

These appointments came only two years after the signing of the Treaty of Paris and just two years before the opening of the Constitutional Convention. Both men would miss the latter because of their diplomatic duties; Adams had been present at the former and had remained in Europe ever since. For the last year the two friends had, with Benjamin Franklin, been touring the Continent seeking to forge commercial treaties with the various powers.

Adams learned of his new appointment in April, Jefferson in May. Jefferson was succeeding Franklin, who was ready for retirement, and the appointment pleased him immensely. He reacted by throwing a huge party at his hotel in Paris with a luminous guest list including John and Abigail Adams, their son John Quincy Adams, Capt. John Paul Jones, and the Marquis and Marquise de Lafayette. Benjamin Franklin would have attended but for his poor health, which kept him at nearby Passy.

On February 28 was born a business that would become over the next century one of the richest on earth: the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone only nine years before, but since then one of the most sweeping technological revolutions of all time had occurred.

Bell had received the patent for his new device on March 7, 1876, three days before he actually got the phone to work and used it to summon his assistant, Watson. In June of the same year he displayed his invention at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, and by the end of the year the device was known around the world. Nonetheless, Bell was unsuccessful in his attempt to sell all rights in the telephone to Western Union for one hundred thousand dollars.

Four freshmen from the state Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, went to a local Woolworth’s together on February 1, made several purchases, took seats at the lunch counter, and ordered coffee.

As they expected, being black, they were refused service. But they stayed in their seats until the store closed. The store’s manager told a reporter: “They can just sit there. It’s nothing to me.” The next day they came back. By the fourth day, some whites had joined them. A week later, students in other North Carolina cities were following suit, and within three months, thousands of whites and blacks had taken up this new form of nonviolent protest and were sitting-in at segregated lunch counters, hotels, libraries, churches, movie theaters, and other establishments across the South, and in the North as well. By the end of the summer more than sixteen hundred people had been arrested for taking part in the sit-ins, and blacks were being permitted into myriad places where they had never been allowed before.

What does Dale Carnegie, the author of an enormously successful book that few people read any more, have to do with In Search of Excellence, the management book that everyone is reading these days? A great deal, as I discovered recently when, purely by accident, I read both books in a single weekend.

As millions of people know by now, In Search of Excellence is a study of American companies that do things right. Its authors, Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., led a task force on organizational effectiveness sponsored by the renowned management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

Not long after the turn of this century, an enterprising man named Bender bought at auction some one hundred thousand glass negatives of Civil War scenes. He took them home, busily scrubbed off the fragile images for their silver, then peddled the clear plates to makers of gauges and meters—one of whom is reputed to have later cut up his share into eyepieces for the gas masks through which a new generation of American boys saw the fighting in France in 1918.

That story comes from the introduction to the first volume of The Image of War: 1861–1865, a recently completed six-volume compendium of almost 4000 Civil War photographs, edited by William C. Davis of the National Historical Society. It is a fine survey, culled over a ten-year period from more than one hundred thousand surviving pictures scattered among three hundred collections, supplemented by solid articles on campaigns and battles and individual cameramen, and marred only by some disappointing printing.

I am glad to see the acclaim given to your first editor, Bruce Catton. It is proper that his fellow historians have honored him by giving a literary award in his name (“Letter from the Editor,” August/September 1984).

His hometown, Benzonia, Michigan, has also commemorated him: in June of 1984 the Michigan Historical Commission unveiled a plaque honoring Mr. Catton.

This was due, in part, to the columnist Judd Arnett of the Detroit Free Press . When he traveled through the northern part of Michigan and found nothing to designate Benzonia as the hometown of the great Civil War writer, he began writing columns about this in the paper. Finally the Michigan Historical Commission got involved, and the commemoration took place.