January 2011

ANY CHILD KNOWS that the amount of fun in a game is likely to be inversely proportional to its educational value. Parker Brothers didn’t press its luck in the 1899 “Ports and Commerce”: it was nothing more than a conventional card game. Still, it was good for a nascent capitalist to learn where yams are sold and so forth, and the game did give a child the opportunity, by matching the pictures of cities with their chief exports. Can you identify the towns shown here? Answers at far right.

D ESPITE TODAY’S high unemployment, the worst since the Great Depression, Congress is reluctant to enact large-scale jobs programs. Today’s conventional wisdom about such help for the unemployed, frequently expressed in congressional debate, is that the New Deal’s massive efforts to provide public jobs were costly, slow, and wasteful. It was a gigantic “boondoggle”—the favorite disparagement of the 1930s, often accompanied by cartoons of sleepy workers leaning on rakes. The Reagan administration has opposed such public jobs as “makework” bound to retard recovery.

Actually, the New Deal’s approach to unemployment was so diversified and its results so mixed, and it so dwarfed today’s efforts, that these summary judgments do less than justice to history. The Civil Works Administration (CWA), for example, begun in November 1933 to counter the rigors of an approaching winter, speedily put four million jobless people to work, half of them transferred from an existing agency, the remainder drawn from the newly unemployed.

THE DAYS WHEN this country was made up of people who were born, lived, and died in small, self-sufficient towns seem impossibly remote. But a set of photographs that turned up recently—a collection unusual in its size as well as its quality—gives an extraordinarily vivid portrait of the residents of one such town in the early years of this century.

Tucked in a valley in north-central Pennsylvania lies the town of Wellsboro, founded in 1806 and laid out with a town green and wide, tree-lined avenues. By 1900 some three thousand people lived in Wellsboro, earning their living in one of the local industries: lumber, coal, tanning, and glassmaking. During this period Wellsboro’s streets were still unpaved and had to be sprinkled to keep down the dust, but small businesses flourished. The town’s commercial district boasted twelve grocery stores, five hotels, four clothing stores, two banks, two sporting goods stores, and—fortunately for us—one photo gallery.

ONCE AGAIN the candidates gear up for a national election; not only the candidates but their wives too. And pity the ladies! Their husbands run against different opponents; they, for nearly forty years, have had to measure up to one woman—Eleanor Roosevelt.

Because Eleanor Roosevelt campaigned across the country for FDR, they too must campaign for their husbands. Because Eleanor Roosevelt championed good causes, they too must be women with a cause. Because Eleanor Roosevelt held press conferences, so must they. In the course of her thirteen years in the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt created the modern First Lady.

Forty years later her grip on the American imagination still holds. So powerful is her model—and, perhaps, so weak is our national historical memory—that its revolutionary quality is all but forgotten. The fact is that Presidents’ wives before Eleanor Roosevelt, whatever their interests or talents, were forbidden to play politics in public. To break this rule was to invite contemporary scandal and historical disgrace.

A TELESCOPE FULLY six stories high turns its forty-inch lens to the skies above Williams Bay, Wisconsin, where the University of Chicago operates the Yerkes Observatory. Any reasonably sophisticated person, seeing that enormous instrument, would conclude that the observatory is less likely to be named for a noted Midwestern astronomer than for whoever put up the money to build it. But no one would guess this particular donor’s motives.

T HE GREAT DEPRESSION was as hard on circuses as it was on every other enterprise, but during those years, R. G. Fiege managed to keep a circus job and to find enough spare time to produce a series of paintings documenting the life around him. Little is known of Fiege—his name does not appear in the vast files of Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin—but he was born in Ohio in 1887, died there eighty years later, and during part of that time earned his living as a sign and poster painter. He based most of his paintings on photographs and was careful to note on the back of each the number of hours he had spent working on it. Literal though he was, Fiege liked to include in his scenes the glorious, long-vanished gilt-and-crimson wagons of an earlier time; and so his paintings reveal more how Fiege felt about his world than they do of circus life in the straitened thirties.

SEVENTEEN EIGHTY-SEVEN was not that long ago. It will be four years before we can celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of what happened in Philadelphia that summer. And it will be something worth celebrating. The United States Constitution was the culminating achievement of the Enlightenment in America, if not in the world. Fifty-five men agreed on a way of government that has been more successful in almost every way than any other in a thousand years and more. Yes, the members of the Constitutional Convention all had their special interests to protect, among them the interests of slaveholders, not among them the interests of slaves. But they listened to each other. They reasoned together. And what they did was not unreasonable. It worked. It still works.

In 1921 Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was charged with what meager regulation of the airwaves there was, called radio “an instrument of beauty and learning.” Waldemar Kaempffert, who, as editor of Scientific American, had followed the beginnings of the technology, in 1922 imagined “a radio mother … crooning songs and telling bedtime stories” while “some future Einstein” could elaborate his theories “to a whole world with an ear cocked to catch … his voice as it wells out of the horn.” M. P. Rice, manager of General Electric’s pioneering station in Schenectady, New York, hoped in 1922 “that the power to say something loud enough to be heard by thousands will give rise to the desire to say something worthwhile.”

The Buffalo nickel has not been minted for forty-five years, but the popular coin, bison on one side, Indian on the other, is well remembered today. What is less well known, however, is that the nickel served as a medium for a generation of hobo artists who reworked the images to produce a token that might be traded for a meal or a shirt somewhere down the road.

The most proficient of all the nickel carvers was “Bo“—George Washington Hughes. He was born in Mississippi sometime around the turn of the century, the youngest of eleven or twelve children of a freed slave. At fifteen, sick of a sharecropper’s existence, he hopped a freight and, in a hobo jungle, fell under the protection of a man named Bert. Bert evidently took his “jocker’s” role seriously: he taught Bo to read and write, instructed him in history and geography—and showed him the art of carving Buffalo nickels.

I have one small correction to make concerning the article “The Essex Disaster” (April/May). The seventeen-year-old Thomas Nicholson was actually Thomas Nickerson . I believe the spelling error was originally made by Captain Chase in his Narrative of the Whaleship Essex .

It might also interest you to know that Nickerson, too, wrote down the story of the shipwreck in his own words—and that his memoirs are at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Incidentally, I am a proud member of the Nickerson Family Association of Cape Cod.