January 2011

The story properly begins in an Emporia downtown street on a Saturday afternoon, August 13,1896.

Kansas was sweltering through a prolonged drought, the thermometer registered 107 degrees, and the sidewalk was crowded with farmers, as always in country towns on Saturday afternoons, wearing patched trousers or overalls. One man stood out from the crowd. Pale, moon-faced, twenty-eightyear-old Will A. White, whose gait, according to his own later account, had the waddle of obesity (“I probably looked like a large white egg”), was clad in his “best bib and tucker”—a linen suit, a gaudy necktie cascading down his shirt from a high starched collar- for he was soon to board a train for Estes Park, Colorado, where he would join vacationing Sallie White. Together they would pridefully read the galley proofs of his first book of prose, a collection of short stories entitled The Real Issue .

On the morning of March 6,1836, a band of 187 Texas revolutionaries died at the hands of some three thousand Mexican troops within the crumbling pile of stones called the Alamo. The romance that still hovers about the place already was flourishing a decade after the massacre, a fact that led a young Mexican War volunteer to make the earliest known paintings of the Alamo—published here for the first time—and to participate in what was almost certainly the first (albeit minor) historical preservation project in the history of the United States Army.

“The most helpful thing I can think of,” Louis Tiffany once wrote, “is to show people that beauty is everywhere…up-lifting…healthgiving.” He showed that beauty most memorably in the opulent, iridescent, glass that made a Tiffany vase or lamp the hallmark of a well-appointed turn-of-the-century home.

June in Middle Village—a time of flowers. Along block after block in that quiet section of Queens in New York, front yards glow with their colors. Roses by the thousands, the tens of thousands. And in the Lutheran Cemetery on the community’s southern fringe, sixty-one red carnations, one for each of the unidentified dead in New York’s worst disaster. Their anonymous bodies lie together in what is known as the Great Grave. Nearby are rows of headstones with the names of more than nine hundred others who died with them, by fire or drowning, one bright June day in 1904.

According to the members of the blueribbon committee, the situation was desperate. Their report, released to the Washington press corps, had been blunt, unsparing, and apocalyptic. “We find the existing situation to be so dangerous,” it warned, “that unless corrective measures are taken immediately this country will face both a military and civilian collapse.” The committee proposed to counter the dire threat by the imposition of nationwide gasoline rationing.

Such a report may be easily imagined in one of the future-crisis scenarios currently making the rounds in the White House or the Department of Energy. In fact, however, it was issued on September 10,1942, with the United States nine months into World War II, and it triggered the nation’s first—and, thus far, only—encounter with the full-fledged rationing of gasoline. How the American people coped with so traumatic an experience may be instructive.

Wise planters of the ante-bellum South never relaxed their search for talent among their slaves. The ambitious, intelligent, and proficient were winnowed out and recruited for positions of trust and responsibility. These privileged bondsmen—artisans, house servants, foremen—served as intermediaries between the master and the slave community; they exercised considerable power; they learned vital skills of survival in a complex, often hostile world. Knowing, as they did, the master’s needs and vulnerabilities, they were the most dangerous of slaves; but they were also the most necessary.

In “The Birth of Social Security” (April/May, 1979) author Kenneth Davis outlined some of the flabbiness and financial uncertainties that plague the system today and might, he wrote, bring it to the edge of a “great crisis.” Whether or not a crisis is impending, one wonders if the present operation can even begin to stack up against the ad hoc “social security system” worked out in 1847 by John Chaffin, gentleman, age seventy-three, and his son, John Emerson Chaffin, yeoman, age twentytwo, both of Holden, Massachusetts. The story is told by Mrs. Nancy C. Knox of Princeton, New Jersey:

Maybe they ought to call this the Uneasy Decade. As we move on toward the twenty-first century (and it really is not so far away, when you stop to think about it), we seem to spend a good part of our time looking back over our shoulders. Satchel Paige, the black baseball star, advised people never to look behind them “because something may be gaining on you,” but we are doing it persistently and perhaps we are beginning to understand what Mr. Paige was talking about. Something back there seems to be overtaking us.- Naturally, we are nervous.

Out of this nervousness there has developed an odd resignation. We are being offered a credo that embeds a whole chain of gloomy expectations in a matrix of unrelieved pessimism; it is possible to become fairly ecstatic in one’s acceptance of approaching disaster. These horrors so clearly foreseen are inevitable. They cannot be averted no matter what we do. The only question is which one hits us first.

Consider these articles of faith:

During the spring of 1825 a handful of prisoners were landed on the shore of the Hudson River at Mt. Pleasant to begin construction of a new penitentiary. For six months they toiled under the wary eyes and ready muskets of their keepers, sleeping in tents and lean-tos. On November 26, the first convicts were safely locked up in the cells of what was to become known as Sing Sing prison.

Until the first prison reforms of the 1870’s, the convicts at the Mt. Pleasant State Penitentiary existed in a state of virtual slavery, living at the mercy of their keepers and guards. Civil rights being what they were in that era, the prisoners did not complain much of their lot, and firsthand accounts of nineteenth-century prison life are rare. Thus, it is particularly arresting to come across a document that tells not only about life on the inside, but does so in verse—the manuscript of John T. Connors.