EXACTLY TEN YEARS AGO this August, the thirty-seventh President of the United States, facing imminent impeachment, resigned his high office and passed out of our lives. “The system worked,” the nation exclaimed, heaving a sigh of relief. What had brought that relief was the happy extinction of the prolonged fear that the “system” might not work at all. But what was it that had inspired such fears? When I asked myself that question recently, I found I could scarcely remember. Although I had followed the Watergate crisis with minute attention, it had grown vague and formless in my mind, like a nightmare recollected in sunshine. It was not until I began working my way through back copies of The New York Times that I was able to remember clearly why I used to read my morning paper with forebodings for the country’s future.
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January 2011
AT THE TIME OF Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency, columnists, politicians, and other sages spoke woefully of the tragedy of Watergate, or the trauma of Watergate, depending on whether their sense of language was Shakespearean or psychiatric. They were, in either case, Washington folk, and apparently not much aware that many of us, out in the country, looked on the thing more as the triumph of Watergate, or even, depending on the length of our standing as Nixon-haters, the Watergate comedy hour—with Groucho Liddy, Harpo Hunt in the red wig, and the President as Zeppo, the straight brother who sings at the end of the show. Martha Mitchell was perfect as Margaret Dumont, and there were several candidates for Chico, Charles Colson for one, though my favorite was Donald Segretti, the busy young California lawyer who signed himself on as an expert in dirty tricks.
FOR MUCH OF THE history of the United States, American artists have looked across the Atlantic: for better schooling than they could find at home, for a culture in which art was valued more highly than it was in Puritan America, and often for style and subject matter. In recent decades, however, the preeminence of American art has brought about a selective revision of our art history. Today the evolution of American art is likely to be presented as a continuous struggle to throw off European influence.
That is only part of the truth. We know Thomas Moran as a painter who specialized in the spectacular mountain scenery of the American West. But the fact is that for decades his most popular subject was Venice. Nor was it only an educated elite that wanted to look at pictures of Venice; in 1898 the calendar publishers Brown & Bigelow reproduced one of Moran’s Venetian paintings in an edition of twenty-two million, an extraordinary figure when one considers that our population in 1900 was about seventy-six million.
ALTHOUGH THOMAS JEFFERSON had evolved very clear concepts of what a modern educational system should be, it was not until 1817 that he had the opportunity to put his theories into practice at Charlottesville, Virginia. He was an old man by then, but there was nothing old-fashioned about his ideas. Age and experience had given him a majestic perspective, not merely of education but of American culture as a whole.
In 1976 the Jefferson-designed buildings and grounds that make up the Lawn were judged by the American Institute of Architects to be the single most outstanding achievement of American architecture.
To make certain that the Lawn is preserved, the University of Virginia is currently seeking to raise an endowment of at least a million dollars. The effort is part of a long-range $90-million drive that has been going on since 1981 to raise funds for the university as a whole. The campaign will run until December 1984.
As of this spring, the restoration of two of the ten pavilions paralleling the Lawn is complete, as is the work on the Rotunda itself. The endowment fund will be used to repair aged roofs, wiring, paint, floors, and termite damage. This is the first time since they were built that the pavilions have undergone any basic rehabilitation.
Cyrus Hall McCormick, the son of Robert McCormick, who was himself an inventor, began to go about his father’s business at an early age. Robert had tried, and failed, to invent a mechanical reaper; his son succeeded. At the age of twenty-two Cyrus devised and patented a hillside plow and was already thinking about the machine that would change the nature of agriculture the world over, the reaper. His early models were imperfect- thev clogged up, or the horses would become tired pulling them; nevertheless he took out “a patent on his reaper on June 21, 1834, because he had read in the April issue of Mechanics’ Magazine of a very similar type of machine being developed by one Obed Hussey. Cyrus wanted to ensure that he got there first.
Anna Sage was forty-two, John Dillinger thirty-one, when they met. She was the roommate of his new girlfriend, Polly Hamilton, who worked as a waitress in Chicago. Dillinger had become the most notorious criminal in America in one incredible eleven-month period. Between September 1933 and July 1934, he and his mob robbed more than a dozen banks, plundered three police arsenals, broke jail three times, and shot their way out of police traps, killing ten people in the process. In March, after escaping from an Indiana prison, he underwent facial surgery, doused his fingertips with acid, and dyed his hair. He was using the name Jimmy Lawrence. He knew that he was the object of an intense manhunt but felt secure enough with his new persona to take his two lady friends to the movies.
ONE DAY IN FEBRUARY of 1917, five nervous young white musicians from New Orleans positioned themselves in front of the wide mouth of a recording horn in the New York studios of Victor Records. They called themselves the Original Dixieland Jass Band, and they were newcomers to Manhattan. No one knew quite what to make of their music—the band was billed opaquely as “Untuneful Harmonists Playing ‘Peppery’ Melodies”—but they had pulled big crowds into an Eighth Avenue restaurant called Reisenweber’s, and that was all recording executives had needed to sign them up. The leader and cornetist, an Italian cobbler’s son named Nick La Rocca, stomped off two tunes: “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step” and “Livery Stable Blues.”
These composed the very first jazz record ever offered for sale, and before it reached the stores, the Victor sales department felt some explanation was necessary: “Spell it Jass, Jas, Jaz, or Jazz, “the catalog said, ”… ajassband is the newest thing in the cabarets, adding greatly to the hilarity thereof. ”
Peter Andrews replies: Mr. Kinzer’s corrective letter breaks down into three main points. He is right on the date of the acceptance of the .45 caliber pistol, and I am glad for the correction. The reasons for the inadequacies of the .45 are a matter of interpretation. I have read sources citing both stopping power and the complicated double-action mechanism. Perhaps both should have been listed, even though most contemporary accounts stress stopping power. The rest of Mr. Kinzer’s complaint seems taken up with my use of the term “bowl over” instead of simply “stop.” In view of the firepower Mr. Kinzer has brought to bear on a point of semantics, I yield.