Everyone is getting ready in one way or another for the Bicentennial. Some of us will be content if we can simply watch the parades go by whilst munching hot dogs that cost under a dollar, but such simple pleasures will not satisfy the doers of good. The reformers sniff their opportunity, and one of them, according to a news clipping before us, detects it in patriotic music. The reformer in question is Senator Clarence Blount, a Maryland state legislator, and his target is his state’s Civil War-vintage song, which begins:
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He was Irish, but with neither the proverbial charm nor the luck. Generals are not much known for the former quality, but the latter, as Napoleon suggested, is one no successful commander can be without. And John Sullivan was an officer whom luck simply passed by.
Surveying his military career, one gets the impression that he was perpetually in motion but going nowhere, that he had virtually nothing to show for all his ambition and energy and combativeness, and that in the end nearly everything he did was counterproductive. It would not be so bad if he had been a likable fellow, but he was not; one senses that he was, by and large, singularly unattractive—always the glad-hander, a politician in or out of uniform, forever overconfident of success on the eve of battle, cocksure that he could do anything that was asked of him and more—and in the wake of events defending himself against the inevitable criticism, endlessly carping and whining about what had gone wrong and laying the blame on someone else or on some mysterious force that was beyond his control.
Flurries of wet snow camouflaged the runway of Cleveland airport in the early winter darkness. of Monday, February 19, 1934. Attended by a small group of chilled spectators and outlined by explosions of light from news cameras, a bulky figure in fleecelined flying suit, leather helmet, heavy boots, and furry gloves clambered into the open cockpit of a Boeing P -12 pursuit biplane. Lieutenant Charles R. Springer pulled down his goggles, fastened his seal belt, waved, and prepared to carry out his orders. By direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt the United States Army Air Corps that stormy Monday had started to transport the nation’s air mail. Lieutenant Springer was to fly a leg of its first delivery.
As a nation we spend a disproportionate amount of time destroying the remnants of our immediate past. There are voices enough to protest against the razing of marble and brownstone monuments, but nobody speaks out for the far more vulnerable and transient victims of rezoning and renewal: cafés, small grocery stores, rural banks, shops, warehouses. Dark, lopsided, and shabby, they hang on for a while in the run-down districts on the edge of town and then disintegrate under the bulldozers to make way for the bowling alleys and condominiums. They are rarely lovely, but they can be strangely eloquent about the pattern of life in their era and the vision of the men who built them. There is something touching about the vernacular architects who strove to make these works attractive and sometimes impressive with too little money and knowledge. Their random decorations and clumsy borrowings from the classical style have invested their buildings with a sad, most American charm.
Charles William Eliot cast a long shadow for a good many of his descendants, naturally enough. As a great-grandchild of his I felt it, too. The summers of my earliest boyhood, at Northeast Harbor, Maine, were spent partly in his austere presence. When he died in 1926, at ninety-two, I was only seven; and yet an incident that occurred only a day or two before his death is still extremely vivid in my memory. My elder sister and I, together with a couple of cousins, had been called into the old gentleman’s sickroom to entertain him with a song. Quaveringly, for I at least was trembling with awe, we offered “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Eliot was meanwhile engaged in a furious battle to breathe. He knew very well that his last hours were at hand. There was no possible way for him to mask his suffering from us. I don’t believe he would have deemed concealment necessary in any case. But what he did want very much to demonstrate was that the part of him that was not in tragic straits enjoyed the song. He showed this with his eyes. They brimmed, not with tears, but with affection and a distant, tender delight.
It would seem that anybody who wishes to see a feather duster will, in a few years, be out of luck. Not so the person who feels a pang of nostalgia for those huge old clear-glass light bulbs, with their spectacular coils of filament. The Society for Industrial Archeology has announced that its latest member is an unlikely institution that has been operating for over a decade—the Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting, in Baltimore. Here the visitor can see the whole panoply of the history and development of the incandescent electric lamp. On display are six hundred bulbs—historical, miniature, decorative, and the longest and largest. These wonders represent only 20 percent of the museum’s collection, as the rest are out on loan to other institutions.
Mrs. Angela Davalos Moran, who lives in a small town near Mexico City, has been tracked down and given some good news by the Veterans’ Administration—her Veterans’ Administration pension will be increased from seventy dollars to a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. Mrs. Moran is the hundred-and-seventeen-year-old widow of a Civil War veteran. In announcing this the Veterans’ Administration added the astonishing fact that at last count there were two hundred and seventy-two Civil War widows still alive and drawing their pensions.
During mid-August, 1918, American forces began landing at Vladivostok, the capital of the Soviet Maritime Territory, in one of the more curious side shows of the First World War. From Moscow it appeared that the United States had joined other western nations and Japan in supporting the White counterrevolution, which just then was making dangerous headway against the Red armies, and on August 30, in a speech before a throng of factory workers, Lenin denounced the United States as a fake democracy standing for the “enslavement of millions of workers.”
From a Washington hazed over with Wilsonian rhetoric about self-determination the perspective was quite different. President Woodrow Wilson wasn’t bent on smashing the revolution but, he said, on aiding a force of over forty thousand Czechoslovak soldiers, formerly a unit of the Russian army and now supposedly heading for Vladivostok along the TransSiberian railroad, thence to embark for the western front to renew the fight against Germany.