January 2011

The single-engine plane comes in low over the green hills of Zululand, then bounces to a landing on a grassy strip. The American tourists clamber out into the African sun. The surrounding countryside is dotted with clusters of thatch-roofed huts, and rhinoceros and wildebeest lurk nearby. The comfort and ease of home have been left far behind. And then, a stone’s throw from the strip, they spot a familiar green and yellow sign, topped by a star. It is a Holiday Inn.

Along with computers, rock music, and fast foods, any listing of mid-twentieth-century America’s distinctive contributions to the world must surely include motels. Today they are found not only along the interstate highways crisscrossing the United States but also in Moscow and Islamabad and beside French country roads, as well as in Zululand.

It is early 1945. An American bomber crew is anxiously nearing the now familiar islands of the Japanese Empire. Flak begins to burst around the plane as the target comes into view. The bombardier releases the payload, and the crew watches as thousands of incendiary bats plummet toward the paper cities of Japan.

This bizarre event never actually occurred, but it very well could have—largely through the enthusiasm of an unlikely war planner by the name of Lytle S. Adams, a Pennsylvania dental surgeon. It seems he was on his way back from a visit to Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, when he learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He immediately thought of the millions of bats that lived in Carlsbad: why not arm the little beasts with tiny incendiary bombs? The following January he somehow got the ear of President Franklin Roosevelt and convinced him that the idea warranted investigation.

Next Adams approached Dr. Donald R. Griffin, a distinguished Harvard zoologist. Griffin was intrigued by the concept and agreed to accompany Adams on a return trip to the bat caves of Carlsbad.

When John Sloan—one of eight Eastern painters known as the Ashcan school—first came to Santa Fe in 1919, he was looking for new subjects to paint. He found a remote mountain town of about seven thousand citizens, two-thirds of whom were Spanish-speaking. Among the “Anglos” (persons neither Spanish nor Indian) was a sizable group of artists. To respect creative work is tradition in both Indian and Spanish society, and Sloan was delighted to find himself politely left alone. Above all, he was enchanted by the look of the place. That summer he wrote his friend Robert Henri, who had first suggested he try Santa Fe, “I have thirteen canvases under way …,” adding that he was at work in one of the studios that the Fine Arts Museum made available to visiting artists. The next year, he and his wife bought property, and from then until 1950, Sloan spent all but one summer in Santa Fe.

Public lands and private longing…

The so-called Sagebrush Rebellion in the West has leaped into the news in recent months as if it had no past—but as the environmental historian Dyan Zaslowsky points out, the attempt to seize public lands for private purposes in this country has a long history.

A march to Montgomery …

It was 1965, nearly a century after the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, and still blacks in much of the American South were not allowed to vote. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., sought to change all that with a mass march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital at Montgomery. Alabama was just as determined to stop him. In a story taut with violence and passion, Stephen B. Oates tells us how victory was won.

A D-day vignette…

The building shown below may look like a low-rise adobe condominium, and in a sense, that is what it is today—someone’s house. But it was once something more: the quartermaster and commissary storehouse for Fort Lowell, Arizona Territory, one of a string of army posts scattered about the Southwest in the 1870’s and 1880’s as bastions against the raids of cunning, resourceful, diligent—and often nearly invisible—Apache Indians. That the storehouse still exists, as well as much of the rest of Fort Lowell, is a tribute to the notion that when concerned citizens get together, something good frequently can happen.

Though he invariably has his way with the small-town girls in a thousand indestructible smutty stories, the actual life the traveling salesman led was not nearly so gleeful. Commercial travelers—there were almost a hundred thousand of them by the turn of the century—rode day coaches from tank town to tank town, lived in railroad hotels, and ate bad food. But perhaps the drummer has gained so ubiquitous a role in jokes because he told so many of them. He had to. A line of the latest scorchers from Chicago or New York City was as important as any sample or catalogue in coaxing orders from the locals. This compulsive joke-telling could be an annoying habit, but it was rarely a lethal one. The painter Archibald M. Willard, however, was witness to an appalling exception. According to a contemporary account, he heard a drummer tell “a particularly good story to a very appreciative man coming up the Lake Shore road. His laughter, very hearty at first, became hysterical and could not be stopped; he struggled, strangled and died in the car.… The drummer has not dared tell that story since.”

I. The Fu-Go Project II. Bats Away!

On August 3, 1976, a retired Japanese scientist made a pilgrimage to a World War II battlefield shrine. Accompanied by a small group of Americans from the nearby lumbering community of Bly, Oregon, Sakyo Adachi climbed a secluded woodland slope and stopped before a monument built of native stone. While the others watched, Adachi placed a floral wreath below an inscription that reads:

THE ONLY PLACE ON THE AMERICAN CONTINENT WHERE DEATH RESULTED FROM ENEMY ACTION DURING WORLD WAR II.

Then he stepped back, pressed his palms together in a gesture of prayer, and bowed. His American companions grasped his hands in friendship.

The people being memorialized had been killed by a weapon that linked the technology of twentieth-century warfare with an ancient object of fragile grace.

Jack Hughes was an outstanding passer of phony bills. A thoroughly honest-looking man, respectably bearded and always well dressed, he spent his working day going from store to store, making one small purchase at each, and paying for it with crisply persuasive counterfeit money.

If his currency ever was questioned and the police called, no case could be made; he never had more than one bad bill in his possession.

His working supply trailed along a full block behind him, in the form of a small boy whose pockets were stuffed with bogus cash. After each stop, he would sidle up and slip Hughes another bill.

But sometime in September, 1874, in Washington Heights, Illinois, something went very wrong. Hughes was arrested by Secret Service agents and indicted for passing five counterfeit bills. He had jumped bail and was being sought by every policeman in Chicago when he joined the plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln’s corpse.