January 2011

The computer is just the latest in a line of technological innovations and revolutions that have changed our language. Obviously the new technology demands a specialized vocabulary for the engineers themselves. But certain words—“glitch,” “interface,” and “to program” are ones that come to mind—are sure to be incorporated into everyday language by people who can’t tell a microchip from a cow chip. The ages of herding and agriculture gave us “bellwether,” “a long row to hoe,” and scores of metaphors derived from sowing and reaping. The ages of steam and machinery put us “in gear” and fashioned “safety valves” for everything from urban riots to executive headaches. Radio, aviation, telegraphy, astronomy, chemistry, electricity, and photography have all made their mark.

DURING THE summer of 1958 Edmund Downing, an American amateur skin diver and a descendant of one of the voyagers aboard the Sea Venture , joined the divers, historians, and archaeologists looking for the wreck of the ship. He spent the summer diving near a break in the reefs off the eastern end of Bermuda and on October 18 finally spotted the faint outline of the keel and ribs of a ship. A salvage operation launched the following summer produced pottery fragments, part of an ax handle, and a pewter spoon—all dating from the right period—and one cannon, identified as belonging to a later century. Discouraged, the Bermuda government cut off funding for the investigation.

When my father, Rear Adm. D. Pratt Mannix 3rd, died in 1957, he had served as a midshipman on a square-rigger and lived to see the atomic bomb dropped on Japan. Born in 1878, he had fought in eight wars, been awarded six medals, and had seen action against Moro pirates and the Imperial German Navy. He had watched the United States grow to be the most powerful country in the world. As the U.S. Navy was responsible for much of this growth, he had had an opportunity to see, firsthand, history being made. His most hazardous and most important duty came during the First World War when he was given command of a minelayer—one of the tiny fleet of ships with orders to lay a mine barrage across the North Sea from Scotland to Norway, thus “bottling in” Germany’s dreaded U-boats. This ambitious scheme had been first envisaged by the assistant Navy secretary, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, within weeks of America’s entry into the war in April 1917. When, at Roosevelt’s prodding, the technology had been devised to make possible mining on such a vast scale, the operation got under way in June 1918.

Mother-Daughter Muddle Mother-Daughter Muddle Andersonville Defended Hoover Underrated Small-Town Weekly: Correcting the Record Small-Town Weekly: Correcting the Record What If? What If? What If? What If? Korean Echo Our Pleasure

In the past the needs and wishes of the elderly have had little force in shaping federal retirement policy, as Mr. Graebner demonstrates in these pages. But the organized elderly now constitute one of the most effective political pressure groups in America. As such, old people see the long-term general welfare interests of the nation and their own immediate interests as one problem. It follows that they want Congress to act quickly and forcefully to remedy the failures of Social Security funding—failures that go back to three crucial decisions made when the Social Security Act was originally adopted in 1935.

• The first of these was not to include everybody in the insurance scheme. About 10 percent of the population—all federal employees and all who derive the whole of their income from investments—remain outside the system.

One of the most influential magazines in America before the turn of the century was The Inland Printer , one hundred years old this year and now known as The American Printer and Lithographer . Although primarily a journal for the trade, The Inland Printer displayed a powerful artistic imagination as it reported the printing industry’s coming of age. The magazine was the focal point of the first great period of American illustration, from 1890 to 1940, promoting the new ideas and! new technology that were influencing all the popular arts. Among the inventions perfected in those years were the high-speed rotary press, the linotype machine, and automatic inking; more important foils popular culture than these technological breakthroughs was the decision, made by The Inland Printer in 1894, to become the first American| magazine to change its cover with every issue—a commonplace today but a revolutionary move then.

THERE ARE hundreds of monuments to our maritime heritage across the nation: the frigate Constitution (Old Ironsides) is still afloat in Boston Harbor; the 1877 square-rigger Elissa is berthed in Galveston, Texas; and the legendary aircraft carrier of World War II, the Intrepid , is tied up at a Manhattan pier on the Hudson River. These are large and impressive examples, but there is an enormous amount of less spectacular activity carried on in the continuing effort to preserve this unique portion of our history.

In 1976 the National Trust created a special program for maritime preservation, and since then more than five million dollars has gone to museums, underwater archaeology projects, training programs, waterfront revitalization, and the restoration of every kind of vessel—from the great sailing ships to dugout canoes. The diversity of this enterprise is revealed by the following projects supported by grants from the Trust in 1982.

THIS PHOTOGRAPH , from the Philadelphia City Archives, is marked “Fireman’s Memorial, 3rd and Girard, 1910.” Mr. John Maass, who sent it to us, is Information Officer for that city and he reports that there is no such memorial at 3rd and Girard or anywhere else in Philadelphia. But he did find a newspaper account of a terrible fire that raged in a factory in that neighborhood on the night of December 21, 1910. The next day the building collapsed, and thirteen firemen and one policeman were killed. Mr. Maass surmises that the picture was made to serve as a model for a sculptor or stonecutter, and he’s probably right. The allegory seems plain enough: Grief for a Fallen Comrade and the Hope of a Better World on High.

The President’s best friend …

If he had been the best friend of the president of IBM, you might have happened to come across his name in a privately printed memoir. But he was the closest friend of John Fitzgerald Kennedy—and, as such, LeMoyne Billings is part of history. This intimate assessment of a thirty-year friendship chronicles the pleasures and tribulations of trying to keep up with JFK from Choate to the White House.

Highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow now …

More than thirty years ago the social historian Russell Lynes wrote a tart essay about how Americans seem to divide themselves into rigid classes according to their taste. Shortly after it appeared, Life ran a chart illustrating it. People got stirred up, and Lynes’s classifications have been talked about ever since. Now, in a lively interview, the originator himself returns to show how we continue to measure our brows in the eighties.

The saga of Varian Fry …