GRESHAM’S LAW DOESN’T go far enough. Not only does “bad money drive out good money” but, as we can now see, bad anything drives out good anything. Fudge-covered graham crackers have driven out real chocolate ones; apartments with low ceilings and thin walls have replaced older, sturdier dwellings; and in restaurant lavatories the so-called hand-drying machine has eliminated the rotating cloth towel. Plastic, of course, has replaced just about everything: the lacquered wooden dashboard in your car, the leather buckle on your coat, and the bone buttons on your suit, the ivory keys of your piano, and even the tiny wooden hotel in your Monopoly game.
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January 2011
For the last several years congressional committees and presidential task forces have been nattering back and forth about what should be done to change the legal order that establishes and specifically empowers and regulates the nation’s banks. They have dealt with their subject as a collection of technical problems they could solve: a bit of oil here, a tightened bolt there, a replacement for a blown gasket—and the old machine will be as good as new. But, in fact, our banking problems are systemic: we need a new machine. Changes in the technology of data processing have made it easy for businesses that are not banks to perform the functions that—until recently—only banks could even attempt, let alone fulfill. And changes in the cost and speed of communications have demolished the barriers that once gave a decidedly local character to the money and credit Americans used in their getting and spending. A uniquely American institution is changing—not only on its face but also in its very innards; a significant factor in our history has come to the end of its time.
IN 1930 THE United States Navy’s first submarine was hauled away from the Bronx park where it had long been on display and was knocked into scrap by a salvage company that had paid one hundred dollars for the privilege. This would scarcely have surprised John Philip Holland, the boat’s inventor: throughout his life he had been beset by every possible mishap and rebuff. What would have surprised him is the fact that eighty-odd years after the U.S. Navy bought his boat, the ocean would yield up its twin and that it would be painstakingly restored by Great Britain, the very nation whose absolute control of the seas had provoked Holland into building submarines in the first place.
“SHE LOOKED DOWN into the yard. The tree whose leaf umbrellas had curled around, under and over her fire escape had been cut down because the housewives had complained that wash on the lines got entangled in its branches. The landlord had sent two men and they had chopped it down.
“But the tree hadn’t died … it hadn’t died.
“A new tree had grown from the stump and its trunk had grown along the ground until it reached a place where there were no wash lines above it. Then it had started to grow toward the sky again…”
It turns out it was Thursday in New York, too, though Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Washington, which was our source, said Friday .
Correction
In our February/March 1984 issue, the portfolio “The Flowering of American Flower Painting” is excerpted from a book , Reflections of Nature: Flowers in American Art, by Ella Foshay. We incorrectly stated the name of the publisher. The book was actually published by Alfred A. Knopf and serves as a catalog for an exhibit of the same name at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York .
THIS PHOTOGRAPH was taken in Hereford, Texas, around 1907, just after the arrival of a “prospectors’ train.” Harlan Hague, of Stockton, California, sent it to us with this explanation: “The Hereford photographer who took the picture was named McGee. My great-aunt, Myrtle Witherspoon, worked for him and developed die photograph. Her fatiier, my great-grandfather, first saw the country around Hereford in the 189Os when he was hauling freight between Fort Worth and Tucumari. He liked what he saw and settled down with his family there in 1898.
Shirer was there …
In 1938 Hitler’s Anschluss made Austria part of Germany. William L. Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , was there to report on it for CBS radio. It was an exciting, tragic time, and now Shirer tells the story of the part he played in creating the modern broadcast format.
Nixon was there (and then he wasn’t) …
It’s been ten years since President Nixon became the first Chief Executive to resign from office. At the time, the editors of this magazine saw the Watergate crimes as “an assault on history itself. …” The question remains: What have we learned from the incredible events of the summer of 1974? Walter Karp and Vance Bourjaily find the lesson.
Adventures of Huck …
John Jay returned to New York in July 1784. He had been in Paris, helping Benjamin Franklin negotiate the peace treaty with Great Britain, which had been signed the preceding September, the last of a series of tasks that had kept him abroad for five years. Jay planned to retire to private life and resume the practice of law. But he discovered on his arrival that, in May, Congress had appointed him secretary of foreign affairs, an office invented in 1781 and first filled by Robert R. Livingston. Livingston is said to have given it up because it didn’t pay enough. Jay was above this, but he had other objections. He believed that the office should be something different and something more than it had been under Livingston, who had contented himself simply with obeying the directions of the Congress. Jay held that if his was to be the voice of a new nation dealing with foreign governments, that voice should be respected. He wanted a degree of autonomy and, above all, the right to choose his own clerks, a right which Congress had reserved to itself. He won his point and accepted the job in December.
No longer at the head of an army, no longer President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant found himself in need of an occupation: “… one thing is certain; I must do something to supplement my income, or continue to live in Galena or on a farm. I have not got the means to live in a city.” One of the things he decided to do—“a spectacularly bad choice”—was to get involved in the affairs of a banking and brokerage firm known as Grant and Ward. His son, Buck, had met Ferdinand Ward a few years before and become his partner. Ward was a fairly imaginative, utterly dishonest man who had done well in his early days on Wall Street and then succumbed to dreams of glory.