January 2011

Each fall for more than a century now, the thoughts of countless young men have turned to the controlled mayhem called football. It may not be the national game, but it has been around nearly as long as baseball, and for many there has been no contest between the two: football wins, knees down.

For reasons best known to the muse of history—or to the gremlin of tradition—the state of Arkansas has contributed more than its share to that agglomeration of legend, myth, tall tale, music, raucous humor, bawdry, and regional peculiarity known as American folklore. Perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most durable, of those contributions is a story-song inspired by the encounter celebrated here in a painting by “C. Gear” in 1899. The song is “The Arkansas Traveler,” and the encounter was real.

“To be President of the United States,” wrote Harry Truman, “is to be lonely, very lonely. …” Perhaps it is fitting, then, that when the President works in the Oval Office, his elbows are resting on a unique memento of drama and endurance in the loneliest place on earth.

In the fall of 1855 the whaling bark George Henry out of New London, Connecticut, was lying to in the ice pack off the coast of Baffin Island, several hundred miles west of Greenland, when a heavy gale blew up from the northeast. When the weather cleared three days later, the George Henry found herself caught in a large, drifting floe. The crew could see land far across the mountains of ice but “could not say to what continent it belonged.” They would get few whales this season.

Long after midnight, October 23, 1781, hoofbeats broke the silence of slumbering Philadelphia’s empty streets. Reeling in the saddle from exhaustion and shaking with malarial chills, Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman, aide to General George Washington, pulled up to ask an elderly German night watchman how to get to the home of Thomas McKean, president of the Continental Congress.

We have in recent years been greatly interested in finding historical parallels between our own Revolution and the post-1945 wars of national liberation in the Third World, those anticolonial movements in Algeria, Angola, Indochina, and elsewhere. Unable to stand up to imperial forces in open combat, modern revolutionists have turned to guerrilla warfare—engaging in small-unit operations, raiding outposts and ambushing supply columns, taking advantage of familiar foliage and terrain, living off the countryside, and relying on native farmers and villagers for support.

One hardly can deny the pervasiveness or the success of guerrillas—or partisans, as they also are called. As the French sociologist Raymond Aron has observed, “In our time, the war of partisans has changed the map of the world more than the classical or destructive machines…partisan warfare has given the coup de grace to European overseas empires.”

Benny Goodman strolled down New York’s Second Avenue one recent morning, covering the nine blocks between his apartment and a health club, where he swims each day, in about ten minutes. During that time no fewer than four strangers recognized him and vigorously shook his hand. They varied in age from near-contemporaries to youngsters clearly born long after Goodman’s glory days. But all had much the same thing to say. “I just want to thank you,” said one, who appeared to be in his late forties. “I can’t imagine my life without you and your music.” Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine twentieth-century America—at least that part of it which has to do with entertainment—without Benny Goodman. No other jazz figure—not even Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong—has come to mean so much to so wide a cross-section of the population as has this quiet-spoken, bespectacled jazz clarinetist.

The Yellow Wall-Paper” first appeared in the January, 1892, issue of The New-England Magazine , and it upset people from the start. Although the brief tale is potent enough to have been included over the years in anthologies of horror stories, it contains no hint of the supernatural; it is, rather, about a cheerful, decent man who, against a background of summer sunlight and with all the good will in the world, drives his young wife insane.

Twenty years later, when it was clear that the story had become something of a classic, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a brief essay explaining why she’d published a tale that, one doctor had told her, was “enough to drive anyone mad.” “It was not,” she said, “intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy …”

It was common ground among everyone who knew him in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s that Henry Hobson Richardson was one of the great Americans of his day. It was not that he ever talked big—that would have been quite out of character—but that he looked big, thought big, and built big.

Bigness became him, moreover. It stood for things that he had in superabundance: energy, ideas, ambition, assurance. What in another man might have seemed just plain old fat was in the case of Richardson an Olympian amplitude. It was as if he needed to bear down on the American earth with the weight of ten men, knowing full well that the American earth would bounce him back.

At Richardson’s death in 1886, his great friend, the actor Henry Irving, wrote, “I most sincerely hope that [his] work … will be continued—for to my mind its prosperity would be a national good. …” Prosper it did. Richardson Romanesque became for a time the only style substantial enough to ennoble banks, schools, and—especially—railroad stations, and Richardson’s imitators peppered the landscape. If some of the examples shown here seem to imitate only Richardson’s eccentricities, even the most excessive betray a certain solemnity of purpose, acquired over all the decades that Americans have gone inside them to vote, to get married, to launch a lawsuit, to testify, to pray, or to pay a traffic ticket.

When a weary rider galloped into Philadelphia with word of Cornwalli’s surrender at Yorktown two hundred years ago this month, the Continental Congress was so strapped for funds that each member had to put up dollar from his own pocket to pay the messenger’s expenses.

The news he brought would have been cheap at any price. The American victory, wrote an exultant James Madison, would surely “cool the phrenzy and relax the pride of Britain.” It did just that, though a final peace and official independence were still two years away. (In this issue we tell of the near-miraculous combination of circumstances that made the American triumph possible.)