January 2011

When AMERICAN HERITAGE heard that Richard Reeves had undertaken to follow the route, one hundred and fifty years later, of a classic exploration of America’s people, places, and institutions, we assigned his friend and colleague Ken Auletta to ask the kinds of questions our readers might if they had the luck to find themselves sitting next to Reeves on a flight to, say, Buffalo or Memphis. (American Journey: Traveling With Tocqueville in Search of Democracy in America, by Richard Reeves, has just been published by Simon & Schuster.)

Tocqueville was among the two or three greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century. Yet he was only twenty-five years old in 1831 when he came to study America. How did he come and why did he come?

A sunlit terrace by a graceful house in the countryside near Middleburg, with the Virginia hills shimmering in the distance. A tall man, slightly stooped but still remarkably handsome, his black hair mildly tinged with gray, his eye penetrating, his manners distinguished, his laugh disarming and infectious. This is Averell Harriman, the supreme public servant of our times, who, John F. Kennedy said, has held “probably as many important jobs as any American in our history, with the possible exception of John Quincy Adams.” Now in his nineties, he recalls his equally remarkable father.

You were born 102 years after George Washington’s first inauguration. This means you’ve lived nearly half the life of the republic. We’ve had forty presidents. You’ve lived in the administrations of eighteen of them—from Benjamin Harrison to Ronald Reagan.

I don’t remember Benjamin Harrison. McKinley was the first I was really conscious of.

“It is better not to know so many things,” Artemus Ward remarked, “than to know so many things that ain’t so.” Especially about crime and crime control.

Everyone “knows” that crime flourishes because the courts are too soft. “It’s time for honest talk, for plain talk,” President Ronald Reagan told the eighty-eighth annual meeting of the International Association of Police Chiefs last October. “There has been a breakdown in the criminal justice system in America. It just plain isn’t working. All too often repeat offenders, habitual lawbreakers, career criminals, call them what you will, are robbing, raping, and beating with impunity and … quite literally getting away with murder. ”

The reason, as everyone also knows, is that police, prosecutors, and judges are hamstrung by the Supreme Court’s exaggerated concern for the rights of the accused. Because of the so-called exclusionary rule laid down by the Warren Court, police and prosecutors are forced to release, and judges to acquit, large numbers of patently guilty offenders.

As a five-year-old, the British military historian John Keegan writes, he was “whisked from London at the first wail of the sirens to a green and remote corner of the West of England” where his father was an inspector of schools for children evacuated from the cities. There Keegan lived out the war. No bomb ever fell on the peaceful backwater where he had been sent to safety, but the war—its machines and ordnance and participants—totally engaged Keegan’s schoolboy passions. In an introduction to his forthcoming book, Six Armies in Normandy, which will be published by The Viking Press in July, Keegan remembers the Americans who were billeted in his town in those pre-invasion days when our presence saturated England.

C LEVELAND : Day breaks clear and calm over Lake Erie on the morning of June 23; a gentle breeze, barely enough to ruffle the water, breathes across the lake from the south. At a quarter past six a few early risers on the beach hear a low rumbling noise. Seconds later they gape in disbelief, then scramble inland.

Under a cloudless sky, a fifteen-foot-high wall of water is rushing toward the beach. The tall, green wave hits with the force of a locomotive. It lifts the steamer Northwest and, to the astonishment of her captain, snaps the eight-inch hawser that holds her to her dock “like a fiddle string.” Other vessels are plucked from their moorings, and the lake spur of the Lake Shore Railroad is washed away, while twenty tons of steel rails are lifted and pitched ten feet. A log seventy-five feet long and eight and one-half in diameter tumbles two hundred feet inland.

Then, leaving a drowned fisherman and thirty thousand dollars of damage in its wake, the freak wave recedes. Within minutes the day is calm as before.

W ASHINGTON, D.C. : “What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American Government, mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with Army tanks,” writes the Washington News on July 30, 1932.

The pitiful spectacle is the rout of the Bonus marchers, the B.E.F. (Bonus Expeditionary Force) as these veterans call themselves. With no jobs or money, they have been camped in Washington for two months; and though some of the twenty thousand who originally trooped into the city wandered home when Congress earlier voted down their demands for payment of their World War I bonuses, others have lingered on, joined in camps along the Anacostia by their wives and children.

The railroad tycoon Edward Harriman was a man of large vision and mysterious ways. When, on a day in March of 1899, he strode into the Washington office of Dr. C. Hart Merriam, chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, and proposed sponsoring a grand scientific exploring expedition to Alaska, Merriam thought he was just another lunatic. He put his strange visitor off until the next day while he checked him out. To his surprise Merriam found the man to be exactly what he said he was—president of the Union Pacific Railroad. The Washington bureaucrat was more attentive at their next meeting. Harriman proposed to charter and refit a steamship for a cruise out of Seattle north along Alaska’s coast and across the Bering Strait to Siberia, and he wanted to recruit the nation’s leading scientists to make a systematic and thorough examination of Alaska. He would bear all the expenses of the ambitious trip and would place Merriam in complete charge of assembling the scientific corps.

As the truck bearing two coffins rolled out the main cemetery gate onto Potomac Avenue, the spirit of Richard Bland Lee must have sighed, “It’s about time.” In 1980, after 153 years, the brother of LightHorse Harry and uncle of Robert E. was finally going home to Sully Plantation in northern Virginia. Until his remains were disinterred, this little-known Lee, as mild as his middle name, had lain in the District of Columbia’s once-proud Congressional Cemetery.

In 1904 ten-year-old Marion Kahlert was hit by a bread truck and killed, becoming the District of Columbia’s first victim of a motor-vehicle accident. Her grieving mother commissioned from Italy a statue of the child, dressed exactly as she had been when she died, in her Victorian high-button shoes and Kate Greenaway dress. The three-foot-high marble monument has always been a favorite with tourists, but in 1981 vandals smashed it. Stonemasons estimate that it will cost ten thousand dollars to remake, and the cemetery committee is now seeking donations to pay for the work.