January 2011

25 Years Ago

October 1, 1979 The Canal Zone, an American possession for 76 years, ceases to exist, as sovereignty of the territory is handed over to Panama.

50 Years Ago

October 28, 1954 Ernest Hemingway becomes the fifth American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, following Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl S. Buck, and William Faulkner.

75 Years Ago

October 24, 1929 Prices plunge on the New York Stock Exchange as 13
million shares are traded. A few days later 16 million shares will be traded. By mid-November, prices will have lost nearly 40 percent of their September peak value.

100 Years Ago

October 27, 1904 The first section of the New York City subway system opens for business. It runs from City Hall to Grand Central Terminal, then to Times Square and up the West Side to 145th Street and Broadway.

AT 9:00 a.m. on October 22, 1879, Charles Batchelor, a researcher in Thomas Edison’s “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey sat down to record the results of the previous day’s work. “We made some very interesting experiments on straight carbons made from cotton thread . . . ,” he began. The results were interesting, indeed. Earlier that month, after more than a year of frustrating efforts trying to make an incandescent light with platinum wire, Edison and his colleagues had struck out in a different direction, using filaments made of carbon, instead. That had proved to be the key decision in the invention of Edison’s light bulb.

In 1965, I was a patrolman with the Suffolk County Police Department on Long Island, New York. One late night on patrol in the hamlet of Selden, I came upon a young man trying to break into Mickey’s Bar, a local watering hole that had closed hours earlier. My first thought was that he was a juvenile trying to get a last bottle of booze for the night. I pulled my gun and cornered him behind the tavern. Pushing him up against my patrol car, I warned him not to move a muscle or I’d blow his head off. (In those days, the rules that governed our dealings with potential lawbreakers were more relaxed than they are now.)

“Don’t worry about me,” the man replied, “just worry about your finger on that trigger.” Keeping my gun trained on him, I managed to reach into my patrol car to radio for backup, which soon came. We collared the guy and a 300-pound accomplice we found waiting in a Chevy, and brought them down to the station house for booking.

Joshua Zeitz makes a persuasive case (“Democratic Debacle,” June/July 2004) that LBJ’s refusal to accede to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party’s demand for voting seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention caused many previously “nonviolent” activists to align themselves with the more militant elements of the civil rights and antiwar movements. However, Zeitz neglects to mention a second important consequence of LBJ’s failure to placate the MFDP in 1964.

mail@americanheritage.com 1964’S FORGOTTEN VICTORY NOW PLAYING ACTOR AGAINST ACTOR ACTOR AGAINST ACTOR EXPLORING THE EXPLORERS

It's back again, and six years of experience has taught me that it’s going to make some readers angry. Others will tell us it’s their favorite feature. Save for a now-distant cover story about Jane Fonda, nothing we’ve published has elicited such vehement responses as “Overrated & Underrated.” This is not because it is controversial, in the usual sense of the word, although it may touch on subjects close to people. For instance, in the category of Regional Food, Danny Meyer —who owns a clutch of the best restaurants in Manhattan—boldly addresses the subject of barbecue (on which even people raised in the Yankee fastness of inland Maine have strong opinions) and then disses ramps, which, not so long ago, were featured on the menu of one of his celebrated chefs, Kerry Heffernan, in his splendid establishment, Eleven Madison Park. This is certainly food for discussion, but not the kind of thing that ordinarily draws cancel-my-subscription letters.

There were no primaries back then to select presidential candidates, no organized political parties, no orchestrated campaigns, not even any established election procedures. But it really didn’t matter, because, when the votes of that odd invention called the Electoral College were cast in February of 1789, George Washington had in effect won by acclamation. While no one could agree what kind of republican government the principles of the American Revolution required, all could agree that Washington embodied those principles more fully and fittingly than anyone else. His trip from Mount Vernon to the temporary capital in New York that April was a prolonged coronation ceremony: rose petals strewn in his path, choirs singing his praises to the tune of “God Save the King,” and even a laurel wreath lowered onto his noble head. The inauguration was a more republican affair. Washington wore a simple suit of black velvet, and the ceremony itself had to be delayed for almost two weeks until a sufficient number of congressmen had arrived. They were all, Washington included, making it up as they went along.

Overrated