Naval power … is the natural defense of the United States,” said John Adams, who more than any other man deserves to be called the father of the American Navy. For more than two centuries, this force—from the raggle-taggle Continental Navy to the missile submarines of today—has played a vital role in the defense of the nation’s freedom and independence. Ships and weapons, tactics and strategy, have undergone quantum changes over the years, but the mission of the U.S. Navy remains unchanged: to ensure safe passage for all those who do business upon the great waters.
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SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
IN 1978 A FEDERAL statute made it illegal for most employers to impose mandatory retirement on workers under seventy. The new law was widely touted as yet another triumph of twentieth-century enlightenment. For, after all, was not compulsory retirement a relic of an era when the abilities of the elderly were not fully appreciated?
It would be comforting, perhaps, to believe that we have indeed progressed. But viewed through the lens of history, our present retirement policy appears to be a step backward, a regression—in time, at least—to a nineteenth-century world based solidly on the work ethic. More important, a glance into the past makes clear that significant changes in policy have always been made to serve broad economic and social needs rather than those of elderly people.
THAT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT was, and preeminently so, the dominant political figure of this century—that he stood astride its first half like the Colossus itself—will not be in doubt. Nor are the reasons subject to serious dispute. It was his fate and fortune to face the two great tragedies of the time and to guide its greatest social achievement. The tragedies were, of course, the Second World War and the Great Depression, and few will quarrel as to the bearing of these two events on the Roosevelt transcendence. The world emerged better and in many ways stronger from both. We will never know, in either case, the disasters, even catastrophes, that might have been.
THE YEAR IS 1890 and the place Cambridge, Massachusetts. On one of the streets leading northeast along the Harvard Yard a man in early middle age—he is, in fact, fortyeight years old, of slight build and medium height but vigorous motion—is walking with a pair of students, boy and girl, who have followed him out of his class in experimental psychology. His face is bearded and his eyes bright blue, and his features reflect the rapidity of his thought. He is William James, the scientist and philosopher. The two who plan to do advanced work in his laboratory are pursuing him with questions, and he is replying as to equals and with his customary fullness of illustration. The girl is short, pretty, and very noticing, and it occurs to her, apropos of the point being discussed, to remark on the large, imposing figure coming toward them. His long, white beard blowing, cane swinging, he seems in a world of his own, talking to himself or else to some invisible listener. He will mow them down if they do not get off the narrow sidewalk.
AFTER YEARS of complex legislation, Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862. It made legal what many Americans had felt was their birthright since earliest times—free land in the West.
It was not an easy gift to receive, though, and many who tried to accept it came to see the Act as a stark proposition: “The government bets 160 acres against the filing fee that the settler can’t live on the land for five years without starving to death.” Nevertheless, tens of thousands took up the challenge. Among them was Warren P. Trimm, who in the 187Os moved his family to Kansas. All through the backbreaking business of trying to build a life on the empty prairie, he kept a diary; years later he sat down with his son, Lee—“the first white child to be born in Township 20S”—and together they composed a narrative of his adventures.
Warren Trimm’s testament was sent to us by his great-grandson, Steve Trimm of Rensselaer, New York.
The last naval engagement of the Revolution was fought on March 10 by the American frigate Alliance (thirtysix guns) and three British ships: the frigates Sybil and Alarm and the sloop Tobago . A preliminary peace treaty had been signed in November and hostilities on land had ceased, but word had not spread to all the ships at sea.
The Alliance was commanded by John Barry, an Irishman who settled in Philadelphia around 1760. A prosperous shipowner, he offered his services to the Continental Congress when war broke out and distinguished himself in several battles—he won Washington’s personal congratulations for his “gallantry and address.”
On March 26 occurred what was not only the most expensive party ever given in America to that date, but one which may still hold the record for conspicuous consumption in a single evening. Mrs. William Kissam Vanderbilt gave a fancy-dress ball at her new house on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-third Street. It was estimated at the time that she spent at least $250,000 for costumes, flowers, carriages, hairdressers, music, food, and drink. An equivalent sum today would be about $3 million. But after all, as The New York Times observed in a headline, it did mark “the end of Lent. ”
IN THE BEGINNING America had little use for the fine arts. Nomadic painters roamed the land and provided signs, decoration, and the occasional likeness of a sitter. But it wasn’t long before they contrived to establish more stable working places. In Boston, before the Revolution, John Smibert sustained a studio by selling art supplies and exhibiting copies of old master paintings and plaster casts of ancient sculptures. In Philadelphia, Charles Willson Peale displayed his paintings together with such scientific curiosities as stuffed birds and mastodon bones. By the middle of the nineteenth century, some artists found it possible to maintain their studios just by painting pictures. The subject of the artist in his studio was a commonplace of European art: Americans, in adapting that theme, brought it home to their own time and place. The period costumes, the paraphernalia of the historical past, were intermixed with the present. There were the inevitable studio props—and in the Gilded Age these could be sumptuous indeed—and an alternatively heroic or everyday view of the artist’s own role.
Twenty-five years after Mrs. Vanderbilt’s party—which had become a symbol of wealth and aristocracy—the Bohemians took over. On February 3 there opened at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City an exhibition of “The Eight,” a group consisting of Robert Henri (the master spirit of the occasion), Everett Shinn, John Sloan, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, George Luks, and William Glackens. Their subject matter was the life they found in the city around them, including tenements, saloons, pool halls, and slums.