January 2011

Walter Karp noted in our December, 1980, issue, that Henry Ford’s astonishing effort to re-create the American past in Greenfield Village, Michigan, was emblematic of a paradox that still haunts us: “It is nothing less than the grand contradiction of modern American life, the San Andreas Fault in the American soul—the schism between our faith in technological progress and our gnawing suspicion that the old rural republic was a finer, braver, and freer place than the industrial America that now sustains us. If that contradiction runs through Henry Ford’s titanic reconstruction … it is because no American ever experienced the contradiction more intensely than Henry Ford himself.”

Greenfield Village, then, is a monument to paradox—and a successful one. But it was not Henry Ford’s only attempt to tinker with the past, and in this other instance the effort was a failure that pointed up not only the contradictions in the man but also his frequently quixotic nature.

When the first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, took office in 1790, his entire staff consisted of just six people, including himself and a part-time translator. The current Secretary presides over almost fifteen thousand employees scattered around the globe. During the intervening years, of course, the challenges facing Jefferson’s successors have changed dramatically as the infant republic has grown into a world power.

Not long ago, David L. Porter, associate professor of history at William Penn College in Oskaloosa, Iowa, became curious as to who had been the best and who the worst among them. A poll of diplomatic historians seemed the best way to find out. There were professional precedents for such a survey: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., twice asked historians to rank the nation’s Presidents, and Professors Roy M. Mersky and Albert Blaustein had more recently polled legal scholars as to the performance of Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The historians who responded to the poll were less united in their choices of the five worst secretaries, and their nominees seem to have little in common, other than the comparative brevity of their incumbencies and the fact that all but one of them—John Foster Dulles- were purely political appointees with little or no experience in the wider world.

1. John Sherman served (1897-98) President McKinley. An Ohio senator (and the younger brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman), he was seventy-four at the time of his appointment—made purely in order to create a vacancy in the Senate for McKinley’s mentor, Mark Hanna, to fill. In failing health and absentminded—he once forgot entirely that his department was engaged in annexing Hawaii—he resigned when an assistant secretary was invited to attend Cabinet meetings in his stead.

When George Washington visited Boston in 1789, the new President received a tumultuous greeting. Among the bands of tradesmen who rallied to parade—all patriotically urging the spectators to buy American—was a contingent of local wallpaper printers, bearing a banner emblazoned with the exhortation: “May the fair daughters of Columbia deck them- 4 selves and their walls with J our own manufactures. ”

In 1893 Chicago played host to a World’s Fair that rivaled the Paris Exposition of 1889 for splendor and exceeded all previous fairs in magnitude. The great Columbian Exposition not only demonstrated what had been accomplished in the four hundred years since Columbus’ first voyage to the New World but also offered a vision of what might be. Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted laid out an orderly arrangement of buildings, promenades, and lagoons as a vision of proper city planning. Electrified streetcars, an elevated railway, model water and sewage plants, and a self-contained oil-burning electrical plant that generated controversial alternating current were among the innovations that earned the fair the nickname of the “Magic City.”

The battle for the Philippines produced one of the most ghastly episodes of World War II when thousands of sick, hungry, exhausted American and Filipino troops surrendered to the Japanese 14th Army on Bataan and were hastily evacuated from the area in a forced march up the peninsula. By the Japanese military code, a soldier who surrendered was a traitor, worthy of the utmost contempt; the prisoners were treated accordingly. In a new book, Death March: The Survivors of Bataan, Donald Knox has interviewed in depth eighty of the survivors and set down the devastating experience they lived through entirely in their own words. The book will be published soon by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and the following excerpt begins with the surrender on April 9, 1942.

Chicago Herald American, April 10:

The humble structure at the right—as the sign conveniently tells us—is indeed a dam, but it is no ordinary dam. It is a logging dam and may be the last of its kind left in the country, the crude reminder of an age in which the white pine forests of Wisconsin were systematically stripped of timber. It was built sometime between 1878 and 1883 at Round Lake on the South Fork of the Flambeau River in north-central Wisconsin, and its function was as simple as its construction.

Im-mi-grate—To enter and settle. … —The American Heritage Dictionary
God sifted a whole Nation that He might send Choice Grain over into this Wilderness. —The Reverend Mr. William Stoughton of Massachusetts (1670)

This was no ordinary fishing run for the fifty small boats that entered the Florida Strait from Key West on a late April morning last year. Their course was south by southwest to Mariel, 110 miles distant on the northern coast of Cuba. Their mission: to rescue an unknown number of political refugees who had unexpectedly been granted exit visas by Fidel Castro.

The Algonquin Indians, legend has it, called the natives who inhabited the mountains of upstate New York ” Adirondacks,” or “Those Who Eat Bark.” And so the mountains got their name—although by the end of the nineteenth century not many of those who came to the mountains would have been driven to eating bark. Consider the 1883 summer excursion of the banker and philanthropist Anson Phelps Stokes, which included, according to his daughter, “Anson Phelps Stokes, wife, seven children, one niece, about ten servants … one coachman, three horses, two dogs, one carriage, five large boxes of tents, three cases of wine, two packages of stove pipe, two stoves, one bale china, one iron pot, four washstands,… seventeen cots and seventeen mattresses, four canvas packages, one buckboard, five barrels, one half barrel, two tubs of butter, one bag coffee, one chest tea, one crate china, twelve rugs, four milkcans, two drawing boards, twenty-five trunks, thirteen small boxes, one boat, one hamper.”