January 2011

I would like to have been present at Aeolian Hall, February 12, 1924. That was the evening when Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was first performed.

What I’d like is twenty-four hours in New York City in the depths of the Depression. Say my birthday on May 9, 1932. I’d like to see the city with the brownstones before the glass towers came, the speakeasies, the multitude of newspapers, the smell of a nation in trouble beyond what we can imagine. I’d pop down to Whitehall Street to see recruiting officers in Sam Browne belts, I’d walk along East Side tenement streets thinking about what this real estate would be worth, one day. I’d listen to what they were saying about Hoover when he was President Hoover, not an evil spirit dragged up for political condemnation. I’m sure the food in most restaurants would be awful—at least that has improved in this half-century—but I’d like to be among people who dressed right, kept their dignity and their class —or so I imagine—and knew who they were and what they were. Give me that! Twenty-four hours only, though, please.

Among the thousands of baseball games I would give an eyetooth to have seen was the third game of the 1932 World Series. Little rode on the game itself: the New York Yankees, nearing the end of the RuthGehrig era, would take four straight games from the Cubs, outscoring the Northenders 37 to 19. The august New Yorkers, winners of seven pennants in twelve years, disliked the Cubs for their tightfisted treatment of an ex-teammate, Mark Koenig; they hoped to humiliate them.

This was the setting for Babe Ruth’s appearance at the plate in the fifth inning. The Wrigley Field faithful cheered encouragement to Cub pitcher Charlie Root. Ruth, belly advancing in front of his dainty feet, walked to the plate and dug into the lefthanders’ batter’s box. (I have a seat behind the third-base dugout with an unimpeded view of Ruth’s round face.) One strike; then another.

In 1936 I was a fourteen-year-old volunteer working at the Massachusetts Democratic campaign headquarters in Springfield’s Kimball Hotel; my immediate superior was nineteen-year-old Lawrence F. O’Brien. On the last day of October I wanted to hitchhike to New York and hear the President speak in Madison Square Garden, but Larry couldn’t spare me, so I missed FDR’s greatest political philippic. He had put up with a lot from the Republicans during that campaign. The voters had been told that he was a diseased tyrant out to destroy private property, the Constitution, even civilization itself; the chairman of the Republican National Committee had gone on the air to charge that under Social Security every American would be required to wear round his neck a steel dog tag (“like the one I’m now holding”) stamped with his Social Security number. Until October 31 either Ray Moley or Louis Howe had been on hand to discourage or soften wrathful presidential replies, but they were elsewhere that Saturday evening, and if I could be passed back through a kind of time warp, I would like to be right by the platform as FDR entered the Garden.

I would have enjoyed witnessing the private conversations between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the young congressman from Texas, Lyndon Johnson.

Hull House was a pioneering social settlement, established in Chicago in 1889 by twenty-nine-year-old Jane Addams. It was the model for settlement houses in cities all across America, staffed by people who shared Addams’s vision of political reform and the need to develop the new field of professional social service.

I would be invisible but nonetheless present in a certain house at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, on the sweltering hot morning of August 4, 1892. At breakfast I would join elderly, tightfisted Andrew Borden, his second wife, Abby, rather stout at two hundred pounds and five feet tall, and Lizzie, the thirty-twoyear-old unmarried daughter of Andrew and his first wife. The necessity of my invisibility would become only too apparent later in the morning, but at this point I would be rather thankful to be under no obligation to partake of the cold mutton, bananas, and black coffee.

Following this meal, the last for Andrew and Abby, I would observe Andrew leaving the house for a walk, after meticulously locking the door, as was his habit. I wouldn’t have long to wait—perhaps an hour at most—before learning the secret that has mystified generations of Americans, and put the name Lizzie Borden forever into the annals of American legend.

My one scene occurred in the Municipal Court of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, over three weeks ending November 2, 1898. It was the jury trial of Thomas I. Kidd, George Zentner, and Michael Troiber, all of the Woodworkers’ Union, on a charge of conspiracy to injure the business of the Paine Lumber Company. The trial helped to establish a union’s right to strike free of conspiracy charges. Counsel for the men was Clarence Darrow, then forty-one and starting to be known as the “Attorney for the Damned” after his defense of Eugene V. Debs in the Pullman Strike of 1894.

Kidd and his associates had been arrested in a strike for a wage increase and union recognition. In the trial, George M. Paine, proprietor of the company, was called as a witness, giving Darrow an opportunity to cross-examine with singular effectiveness. His questions exposed the “infamy of Paine’s business methods —the inhumanity and contempt he displayed toward the men who worked in his factory, his hypocrisy and rapaciousness in dealing with his workers,” as Kevin Tierney phrased it in Darrow’s biography.

I would like to have seen someone I’ve always distrusted a bit but fear I might have admired a good deal. I’d like to have seen Theodore Roosevelt. Not at San Juan Hill, not shooting wild animals, setting up the National Park Service, entertaining Booker T. Washington at the White House, or getting the Russians and Japanese to sign a peace treaty.

I would like to have seen him at Madison Square Garden in the fall of 1912 when he was running for President on his own Bull Moose ticket against both Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft. There he was, rejected by politicians of the Republican party he had served, but determined to regain the Presidency after stepping aside for Taft four years earlier.

Both major parties feared him, but the Progressives of the day—Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann, Learned Hand—thought he was a demigod. “TR bit me and I went mad,” William Allen White said, speaking for a generation of intellectuals.

Coatesville, Pennsylvania, August 18, 1912: In a rented room of the Nagel Building, opposite the church, John Jay Chapman, aged fifty, the literary critic from Boston who had in his younger days fought for reform with Theodore Roosevelt in New York, is holding a prayer meeting in memory of “the Negro Zacharia Walker,” lynched in Coatesville on August 13 of the previous year.

Renting the room, advertising the meeting in the paper, and answering the suspicious questions of Coatesville citizens had been trying. Chapman was acting alone, but nobody believed this. Civil rights were words not yet thought of, but here surely was their first self-appointed champion, performing a symbolic act.