January 2011

AMERICANS HAVE BEEN turning out political cartoons since the dawn of the Republic, but in the nineteenth century the drawings tended to be verbose and cluttered, their characters trailing long ribbons of speech balloons as they stumbled over obscure symbols. It took the national turmoil that surrounded the emergence of Franklin Roosevelt to bring the art to its incisive, confident, acid maturity. On the eve of the election, we offer a portfolio of cartoons both admiring and execrating from the last thirteen presidential contests.

FOR A DEBUTANTE in turn-of-the-ceiitury New York, the highest mark of approval was having Peter Marié request a miniature portrait. Marié, a descendant of French planters in Santo Domingo and a beau of the old school, had made a fortune in New York before retiring at the age of forty in 1865. He went to all the grandest parties, entertained, belonged to New York’s best clubs. And he greatly admired beautiful women. The lifelong bachelor did more than admire them; he asked for their likenesses, acquiring so many that his house on Nineteenth Street became an informal museum of Society beauties. Even at the time, his habit was not merely old-fashioned, it was retrograde; by the 1880s, photography had long since taken hold, and the art of miniature painting was all but dead.

JESSE JACKSON’S impressive performance during the long primary season of 1984 has made one thing absolutely clear: If the Democratic candidate hopes to unseat Ronald Reagan in November, he will have to count heavily on black votes. The political arithmetic underscores the point. In 1982 the number of unregistered blacks of voting age exceeded Reagan’s 1980 margin of victory in nine states—Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and New York. For the past two years, voter registration drives have raced to sign up as many of these unenrolled citizens as possible in time for the 1984 presidential election. And black voter turnout—which in 1982 rose at a faster rate than the white vote did—has shown how successful those registration drives have been. The new clout of blacks at the polls also has been demonstrated by the recent victories of black mayors in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Charlotte to go along with those already scored in Atlanta, New Orleans, Birmingham, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

THE FIRST BALLOON FLIGHT in America lifted off from Philadelphia in 1793, and the 100th anniversary of the event prompted a reawakening of interest locally. That year a group of Philadelphians banded together to build a series of balloons, the last and largest of which, christened Ben Franklin , began flights in 1907. By chance, the group acquired the services of an official photographer, William Jennings. Jennings was eager to shoot views of Philadelphia from the air, and he finally talked his way onto his first flight by offering to pay all costs. Once aloft, Jennings described himself as a “Photo Birdman, rushing through Cloudland.” His aerial views turned out well, but the photographs he took of the flights themselves are more wonderful still. In a scrapbook he titled “The Evolution of Aviation,” Jennings’s pictures document one man’s delight at learning to fly.

—J.C.

SINCE ITS FOUNDING , this magazine has published over forty articles on the history of medicine in the United States. Among them we’ve told of the discovery of anesthesia and the conquest of yellow fever; in 1955 we recounted George Washington’s personal medical history in a story that has been reprinted more times than any other we have published. In the special section on American medicine in this issue, we add six more stories to the count, stories with an emphasis on what has happened in medicine over the past century.

It is obvious why a magazine of history returns frequently to this subject: it is dramatic, it is almost always a story of victory over an appalling danger, and it is the one subject that always relates to and justifies the use of that tired phrase “quality of life.”

WHEN HIPPOCRATES wrote in the fifth century B.C. that “he who would learn surgery should join an army and follow it,” he illuminated the central irony of military medicine. Destructive as war is, it makes possible quantum leaps in the art of healing. And it is the surgeon who benefits most directly: war has been described as an “epidemic of trauma,” and the vast supply of wounded men provides opportunities for experimentation and innovation unthinkable in a world at peace. But surgery is not the only branch of medicine that advances. In all wars fought before World War I, more men died from disease than from military action, so the necessity of keeping troops on the field provides a powerful impetus to wipe out the illnesses that prey on armies. Finally, there is the matter of logistics—how to move a man quickly to a place where he can be treated. Here, too, lessons learned in wartime have dramatically improved health care when peace came.