January 2011

On December 14 delegates from three western counties recently ceded to the Union by North Carolina met and voted 28 to 15 to form a state of their own, the State of Franklin. They agreed on a provisional constitution and prefaced it with a declaration of independence asserting that being abandoned had “reduced us to a state of anarchy.”

Earlier, Congress had urged states to give up to the Confederation their western lands, and North Carolina’s legislature responded in April by voting to cast off a region that was remote, expensive to protect, and peopled, according to one assembly leader, by “offscourings of the earth.”

The people of Franklin simply wanted to protect their interests. But without knowing it, they were rebelling—North Carolina had decided to rescind the cession on November 20, primarily because the federal government refused to repay the state for Indian expeditions in the area. Word of the cession repeal arrived just after the convention ended, and from then on the Franklin movement was confused, divided, and ultimately doomed.

At about 2:00 P.M. on the windy afternoon of December 6, a small group of men on a wooden platform 550 feet above Washington, D.C., witnessed the lowering into place of the 3,300pound capstone of the Washington Monument. Into the top of the capstone one of them then screwed the very peak of the monument, a pyramid of solid aluminum just 8.9 inches high.

Thus was completed a construction job that had taken more than thirtysix years. Aluminum, a novel metal more expensive than silver, had been chosen to top off the marble structure because it would conduct lightning efficiently yet virtually never corrode. At one hundred ounces, this was the largest piece of the metal that had ever been cast.

Once the apex was fastened, flags were unfurled, a twenty-one-gun salute was fired from the White House grounds, guests near the top of the monument sang “The Star-Spangled Banner, ” and a representative of the Washington Monument Society read a resolution hailing its completion. (A far grander ceremony would be held on the following Washington’s Birthday.)

Christmas Eve seemed everywhere the most hopeful since the beginning of the Depression. In the White House, President Franklin D. Roosevelt read aloud to his family from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol . As his wife, Eleanor, later observed, “For all his advanced political theories, he clung to the old-fashioned traditions in many curious little ways.”

He also insisted on real candles for the Christmas tree. Eleanor had felt compelled to make a statement about that apparently hazardous custom several days earlier: “The President feels that a tree doesn’t look right without candles,” she explained, “and hasn’t the right atmosphere unless it smells of hot evergreen.”

The President grew his own trees at Hyde Park—but not entirely in respect for family tradition. When reporters had asked his cousin Theodore Roosevelt how he would decorate his White House tree, he had said there would not be one. As a conservationist, that Roosevelt disapproved of all Christmas trees.

What is the one scene or incident in American history you would like to have witnessed—and why?

The great majority of those we asked were intrigued by the idea of being a fly on the wall at an epochal event. And the range of their answers confirms that the historical imagination is as unbounded today as it was in 1954 when our first editor, Bruce Catton, established the founding principle of the magazine: “Our beat is anything that ever happened in America.”

On the pages that follow, you’ll find a selection from among the many replies. Taken together, they turn out to be an amusing, moving, and surprisingly coherent narrative history—one that we believe fulfills C. Vann Woodward’s challenge “to summon the past into the present.”

The great event that made all of human history possible, including this magazine. occurred some sixty-five million years ago. Its primary evidence lies in America.

Few people know that mammals evolved at the same time as dinosaurs, more than two hundred million years ago. They did not arise later and drive dinosaurs to extinction by their superiority. They lived, rather, for one hundred million years as small, rat-sized creatures in the interstices of an ecological world ruled by dinosaurs. In no way did they challenge or displace dinosaurs. Then, some sixty-five million years ago, dinosaurs were wiped out along with many other forms of life in one of the great episodes of mass extinction that have punctuated the history’ of life. The small mammals survived and took over a world emptied of its former rulers. We evolved much later as a result of this good fortune ‘we are a cosmic accident. not the result of a predictable process1. If the extinction had not occurred, dinosaurs would probably still dominate the earth, and conscious creatures would not have evolved.

I would like to have been among that small company of sailors in the moonlit, predawn moment. October 12. 1492. when a lookout aboard a small vessel hailed the sand cliffs of an island never before seen by the eyes of Europeans.

Had I rushed to the ship’s rail with Christopher Columbus. I would have witnessed his triumph and shared in the joy and amazement of his companions. Although I would not have known it at the time. I would have been present at the instant that began the European colonization of America.

After reading Robert R. Phillipson’s comments about ailanthus trees in your August/September correspondence column, just to be sure, I reread one sentence: “The rings on which horses had been tied were grown over and were fifteen feet high on the tree. ” Either the horses were of Trojan proportion or the ailanthus tree exhibits a unique growth characteristic.

There is an item in the article about the court-martial of Lt. Jackie Robinson (August/September issue) that raises a question. On the first page of the article there is a picture of Lieutenant Robinson in Class A uniform with a branch insignia of the cavalry misplaced on his left lapel. The credit on the photograph is the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the date is November of 1944. On the sixth page of the article is another photograph of Lieutenant Robinson signing his contract with the Montreal Royals in October 1945, almost a year later, and the cavalry insignia is misplaced in the same fashion.

The usual placement of the brass is as it appears on Robinson’s other lapel. And what was he doing in uniform in the signing picture, which was a year after his discharge? Is it possible that both photographs were taken at the same time?

Jules Tygiel replies: Mr. Gibb appears to be correct. It seems clear that the two photographs (which I did not see prior to publication) were taken at the same time, most likely at the time of Robinson’s signing with the Montreal Royals. Robinson wore civilian clothes at the actual signing ceremony. However, both the Dodger and Royal officials stressed his military background as added justification for giving Robinson the opportunity to play in organized baseball. It is entirely possible that they had him pose in his uniform jacket to dramatize this point.

If there is a certain amount of confusion in the Supreme Court’s handling of the church-state separation question in various cases, there is even more confusion—and some downright distortion of fact—in Professor Morris’s “The Wall of Separation” (August/September issue).