THE SUPREME COURT has been busy of late scrutinizing the “wall of separation,” a figure of speech attributed to Thomas Jefferson. It is not like the ugly Berlin Wall, built of concrete blocks and topped with broken glass and barbed wire. Rather it is more like a double-mirrored screen. Persons standing on either side discover whatever preconceptions about the First Amendment they may have brought with them.
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January 2011
The article “Take My Wife—Prithee” by David Sherwood in your April/May issue suggests that a husband posted his wife mainly to cut off her credit.
I have a handbill that was printed by one of my ancestors and posted all over Chester County, Pennsylvania, and once you have worked your way through its catalog of Mrs. Taylor’s shortcomings, you will see from the last paragraph that her husband composed his bulletin to justify his separation from her.
I do not claim descent from this “dissolute Harlot.” She was John Taylor’s second wife, and she bore him no children:
ANYONE WHO RECALLS the Gilded Age from an American history course taken twenty or more years ago would be surprised at how the treatment of that era has changed. Most historians used to hold a rather low opinion of the period. Remember Grover Cleveland’s illegitmate child, who figured in the campaign of 1884? And how business appeared dominant in every sphere of life? How Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller amassed huge fortunes with monopolistic “trusts”? And how, toward the era’s end, when lightning seemed to strike everywhere at once, farmers staged a revolt that frightened almost everyone else half to death?
AT ABOUT TEN O’CLOCK on a smoggy Wednesday night, July 13, 1960, in the vast inner space of the Los Angeles Sports Arena, the national convention of the Democratic party was ablaze with light, drowned in noise, bubbling with red, white, and blue placards, and reeking with tobacco smoke and the tension of more than ten thousand people. At stake in the next hour or so would be the party’s 1960 presidential nomination, the winner almost certain to oppose Republican Richard Nixon, the incumbent Vice-President, in the fall campaign. At least for the duration of the political season, the Democrats assembled would soon resolve the destiny of one man among several contenders—in all probability, Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
WAITING FOR THE MORNING TRAIN is Bruce Catton’s memoir of his boyhood in a small Michigan town named Benzonia—an etymologically suspect word that is supposed to mean “good air. The town was founded in the 1860s solely to support a tiny Congregational college on the edge of the forest, and its population never rose above three hundred and fifty. Benzonia dedicated itself to the perfectibility of human society and to good works. “We felt that the eye of God was constantly upon us,” wrote Catton, and his memoir confirms that if God was looking, he would have pronounced Benzonia quite satisfactory.
If Benzonia sounds a bit unreal, it was. In a hard-bitten lumbering region, it was exceptional, and Catton never forgot that he had lived briefly in a lost Eden: in fact, one of the most conspicuous landmarks east of town was actually named Eden Hill.
TOWARD THE END of his life, in the 1880s, David Matthew could go across the bay from his San Francisco home and see the long transcontinental trains rolling into Oakland. Behind them to the east lay more than a hundred and fifty thousand miles of track and a nation that had, in the past half-century, been entirely transformed by the railroads. Matthew took a certain personal pride in that change: fifty-odd years before, when there were just just ninety-five miles of track in the country, he had helped build the De Witt Clinton and had taken that renowned locomotive on her first run between Albany and Schenectady.
IN THE SUMMER of 1881, as James Garfield lay dying of an assassin’s bullet in the White House, a team of naval engineers was called in to solve a vexing problem: how to cool the President’s bedroom. The temperature in Washington was hovering above ninety, and the humidity was uncomfortably high.
Within a week of the shooting, working virtually around the clock, the engineers had rigged up a contraption that provided some relief. It consisted of a large cast-iron box, about the size of a coffin, which contained dozens of screens, each made of a thin layer of terry-cloth cotton. On top of this box was a tank holding more than half a ton of shaved ice, salt, and water. As the ice melted, it turned into a briny slush, which trickled down onto the terry-cloth screens. A fan at one end of the lower box sucked in air from the outside, which was cooled as it passed across the screens and was then pumped through a duct into the President s bedroom.
I WAS TAUGHT TO REFER to it in mixed company only as “perspiration,” not sweat, but whatever it was flowed freely in the summer dog days of my youth, the 1920s and early 1930s. It headed the forehead, streaked the cheeks, and dropped off the chin. Ladies merely “glowed,” very likely because steady application with a fan does evaporate moisture; with skill and practice, older women of, say, nineteen or twenty (I was fifteen in 1929) could also employ fans with devastating effect on the opposite sex. Senators, judges, and Southern planters might wave them over the juleps—cause and effect taken together—but no boy might use them and retain the respect of his fellows. In school and college classrooms the obligatory jacket and tie made a scorcher worse, dampening the shirt and lengthening the hours. It was also the age of the soggy handkerchief, since whoever invented Kleenex was inexcusably tardy about it.
LANGUAGE EVOLVES so rapidly that today we can no longer even understand some of the words the American colonists brought with them from Europe or devised to fit their lives in the New World. Here are some startling or amusing examples:
American Legion ( n. )
The provisional corps of Tories raised by Benedict Arnold after his defection in 1780. He was successful in enlisting only 212 men, which body participated in the raid on Fort Griswold and New London the following year.
Apartment ( n. )
1. A room in a building. In 1760 John Gait wrote, “Mr. Robinson conducted the artist to the inner apartment.”
2. A compartment. Washington in his 1760 diary reported that he “mixt my compost in a box with ten apartments.”