January 2011

In Sydney, Australia, on December 26, Jack Johnson defeated the Canadian Tommy Burns for the heavyweight championship of the world before twenty-five thousand spectators. Burns had long avoided the fight, claiming as he did so that Johnson was “yellow” and had no chance. The thirty thousand dollars paid to Burns was the biggest purse in boxing history to that date; Johnson got five thousand dollars.

Johnson trained in Australia and puzzled sports fans by his methods. He did a great deal of road work and bag punching but little actual boxing. He also, to the wonder of all, outraced a kangaroo, caught and subdued a greased razorback pig, and ran a jack-rabbit, considered the last word in animal speed, to death. (The kangaroo had also died of exhaustion.) In spite of these triumphs over the animal kingdom, Burns was the favorite of the bettors.

“I say to you that from this date on, the Eighteenth Amendment is doomed!” These prophetic words were spoken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he accepted his party’s nomination in 1932. Even Herbert Hoover, the incumbent, had grudgingly—and with much hedging—admitted that the Eighteenth should be repealed. It was only a matter of time.

The time arrived on December 5. Utah was the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment (Repeal) and it went into effect immediately. Prohibition, the “noble experiment,” was over.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to find anyone today with a good word to say about it. To Prohibition is attributed the birth of large-scale organized crime: it created the gangster. The scope, wealth, and murderousness of mobs like Capone’s were the direct result; there were more violent deaths in Chicago alone, for each year of Prohibition, than in all the British Isles.

IN 1922 GEORGE EASTMAN, the great photographic industrialist, built an elaborate movie house in his hometown of Rochester, New York. Eastman paid close attention to its every detail, from the massive, imported chandeliers to the seating capacity of the second balcony. Since the mass-produced studio artwork of the time didn’t meet Eastman’s standards, he commissioned a young local artist named Batiste Madalena to herald his picture shows.

Madalena, who at the age of eighty-one still lives in Rochester, came there from Italy as an infant in 1904. He graduated from the local Mechanics Institute in 1924, planning to study art in New York City. Instead he met Eastman and was diverted to movie posters. Madalena received little supervision from his normally finicky patron. “All he told me,” he recently recalled, “was that he didn’t care what I did as long as the people passing the theater could read the posters from the trolley.”

We have quite a historical and famous octagon here at the Red Mile harness track in Lexington, Kentucky. The Red Mile, which started as a country fair association in 1875, is now owned by the Lexington Trots Breeders Association. We will celebrate our 108th continuous year of harness racing this fall. The octagon (above right) has become our most famous landmark.

It was built in 1879 by John McMurtry, a local architect, as a floral exhibit hall for the county fair association and was also used for selling auction pools (betting) on the races. Known variously as “Floral Mall,” the “round barn,” and the “Berry barn” (for the famous trainer Tom Berry), the building is now a museum, the Standardbred Stable of Memories.

Isn’t there an Octagon House in Washington, D. C., that antedates Fowler by many years? During the First World War I delivered some documents to that building, which was then in use by a branch of the government. I seem to remember that it had served the government many years previously, after the attempt to burn the White House during the War of 1812.

Perhaps a little research will either verify my memory or find me entirely at fault.

Built by Dr. William Thornton in 1800 and used as a temporary White House during the winter of 1814, The Octagon is now a museum of decorative arts. Despite its name it is not considered a true octagon because its sides are not of equal length, as the drawing and photograph above demonstrate .

Almost heaven: the adaptable American suburb …

More Americans now live in suburbs than in cities and rural areas combined. And much as the character of the suburb has changed through the years, the dream remains the same: Rural Bliss, far from the city’s madding crowds. For this Americans have commuted by horse, steamboat, trolley car, railroad, and automobile for more than a century. Professor John R. Stilgoe tells the whole story.

The bitter triumph at Ia Drang …

It was here that American troops in 1965 fought the first major battle against regular North Vietnamese forces. They won this and every other battle; they won everything except the war. Harry G. Summers, Jr., of the Army War College explains how the seeds of our ultimate defeat in Vietnam were sown in the victory at Ia Drang.

Bravo Caruso! …

EVERY TELEVISION documentary on the twenties seems to spend a lot of time on crazes, always including marathon dancing—those dispiriting contests in which heavylidded couples held one another up as they shuffled back and forth. Watching one such program with my parents many years ago, I innocently asked my mother what it had been like to take part. “What kind of girl do you think I was?” she answered, with what I remember as genuine outrage.

It was my first inkling that old film doesn’t tell the whole story. I have never stopped watching documentaries—the simple fact that there is authentic footage of Leo Tolstoy or Queen Victoria or San Francisco before the earthquake still seems miraculous to me. But I do now know that the use television usually makes of it is pretty bad: the same weary snippets of newsreel spliced together on the cheap, with narration either portentous or patronizing, and sometimes both at once.

1783 Two Hundred Years Ago 1883 One Hundred Years Ago 1908 Seventy-five Years Ago 1933 Fifty Years Ago

The Octagon House in Watertown, Wisconsin, has a new look since Alexander Boulton photographed it (top right) . In 1982 the original wraparound porches were restored. This restoration culminated about forty years of thinking, talking, and delay. Cost was the dominant factor, but the recession allowed a local contractor to do the job for fifty thousand dollars. Memorial monies and gifts from local industry and friends of the house paid for most of the work.

I regret that Mr. Boulton did not stop by Clayton to inspect our nearly mint-perfect specimen (above right) , the only antebellum octagon house in Alabama, and the only true example of gravel-wall construction still standing in the United States. The house was built in 1859 by Benjamin Petty, a native of New York State, and had been lived in continuously by two families until 1981, when the town purchased it. It is listed on the National Registry. We have received grants for returning it to its original condition from the National Trust, the Alabama Historical Commission, the State of Alabama, and the CDBG program as well as donations from individuals. We expect to begin the restoration work shortly. We believe that our entry in the octagonal race is the only house surviving of its age, construction, and physical condition. None of the houses pictured in your article matches ours in these respects.