January 2011

THERE IS NO clear consensus on what constitutes greatness, nor are there any objective criteria for measuring it—but when we look at holders of high public offices and at the current field of candidates, we know it is missing. Some of our leaders are competent, articulate, engaging, and some are honest and honorable. But greatness is missing.

The leaders of the early republic—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall—set the standard for greatness. Since their day only Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Boosevelt have attained equivalent stature. Why has mediocrity come to prevail where meritocracy once ruled? Where have all the great men gone?

1784 Two Hundred Years Ago 1884 One Hundred Years Ago 1964 Twenty Years Ago

WHEN, ON COLUMBUS DAY OF 1980 , the operatic superstar, Luciano Pavarotti, sitting on a bay horse, his massive bulk arrayed in fancy dress, jounced up New York’s Fifth Avenue at the head of the annual parade celebrating the discovery of America, some elitist opera patrons were dismayed. A primo tenore , they believed, should stand aloof from the common run, should maintain an inaccessibility, a certain mystery. But there is lofty precedent for Pavarotti’s extracurricular capers, set by a man who was probably the greatest singer ever heard and almost certainly the best loved, who made his American debut at the Metropolitan Opera House eighty years ago last November—Enrico Caruso.

Caruso was known, when about to sing Canio—the sobbing cuckold of I Pagliacci —to walk the three blocks from his Times Square hotel, the Knickerbocker, to the opera house, wearing his clown costume, followed by a cheering, laughing, adoring crowd.

On February 23 there appeared in the New York newspaper Packet a notice that read: “ BANK . It appearing to be the disposition of the Gentlemen in this City, to establish a Bank on liberal principles, the stock to consist of specie only: they are…hereby invited to meet…at the Merchant’s Coffee-House; where a plan will be submitted to their consideration.”

The meeting was held the next day and a committee appointed to sell a thousand shares at five hundred dollars each. The bank was to be organized when half the shares were taken; this was quickly managed, and so came into being the Bank of New York.

Alexander Hamilton bought a single share of the stock. He had retired from Congress the previous year to devote himself to the practice of law. He was, with his lone share, elected one of the directors of the new enterprise and remained so until he resigned in 1788.

A FTER HE WAS MUSTERED out of his beaten army in 1865, Charles Hemming went west to Texas and a highly successful career as a banker. But he never forgot the men he served with, and in 1898 he came home to raise a Confederate monument in Jacksonville. A few years later, still full of thoughts of the conflict in which he played so strenuous a role, he set down the long and fascinating account from which this article is drawn. This previously unpublished memoir was sent to us by Hemming’s granddaughter, Lucy W. Sturgis.

Florida seceded from the Union on January 10, 1861; on January 11 Hemming joined the Jacksonville Light Infantry. Two years of hard campaigning brought him, in the fall of 1863, to Tennessee. There Confederate forces under Gen. Braxton Bragg had laid siege to Chattanooga. Three of the ablest generals in the Union Army—Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and George Thomas—moved to relieve the threatened city.

IN THE INTRODUCTION to his Gateway to History , Allan Nevins, a journalist turned Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, regretted that American magazines no longer published the kind of historical articles that had been the pride of editors before the First World War. Nevins called for a magazine of history that would bridge the gap between scholars and the general public. While the subject matter of the professors was important and evocative—what, after all, could be more fascinating than the story of man in time?—with few exceptions the professors simply could not write well enough. Their admirable ability to extract detailed knowledge of the past from documents was not commensurate with their ability to sense, imagine, and express.

BEFORE THE DISCOVERY of gold at Sutler’s mill in 1848, the population of California was too small and too scattered to produce much painting. In modern times the history of art has paralleled the rise of cities and new wealth, and it was gold that made San Francisco large enough and rich enough to support California’s first art community.

Many of San Francisco’s early artists were Europeans or Easterners with good professional training. Like other forty-niners, they had left their homes, attracted by the dream of instant wealth. But at first even well-trained painters had to do every kind of hackwork, from portraiture to commercial lithography and engraving. There was little demand for painting as art.

NOWADAYS MONEY SEEMS to have become a pure idea, a universally agreed-upon fiction conveyed by pieces of paper, plastic cards, computers, and coins made of nearly worthless metal. But until just fifty-one years ago, money meant solid gold, that precious, rare, beautiful, glamorous, and nearly indestructible element which had stood throughout history as the invulnerable guarantee of financial security. For 138 years, from 1795 through 1933, the United States grounded its currency in gold (as well as silver part of the time) and issued hundreds of millions of gold coins, valued at one to twenty dollars apiece. They were worth their weight and were traded freely. Today most of them are gone—they were melted down for bullion, both by citizens and by the government.

IF YOU WANT a quick fix on what upper-middle-class Americans were doing between the two World Wars, look at the cartoons of Gluyas Williams. It will take less time than reading Dodsworth or the works of J. P. Marquand, and will be just as accurate. Accurate observation was the essence of Williams’s art, and he was, in the words of one magazine editor, a “superb noticer.”

As a rule, Williams drew only those things that he had observed personally. Years after he retired, he described his working methods this way: “I’d watch for things to happen at the West Newton Station in the morning or evening—things like somebody trying to get through the station door to buy a paper, just as everyone else surges out to board the train; or trying to get a taxi at the station on a rainy night; or the way everyone in the station starts for the platform when a train rumbles by, and it’s usually a freight train; all those little everyday occurrences can be built into cartoons.”