January 2011

The 407-ton packet Ellerslie left New Orleans on December 30, 1848, on a royage that now would be forgotten save for the discovery of a series of watercolor sketches done by one of the passengers, James Guy Erans, a minister and maritime artist bound for the ship’s home port of Baltimore.

Commanding the Ellerslie was Captain Joseph L. White. With him were his wife, Ann, and his little daughter, Mary Elizabeth. Mrs. White must hare been relieved to be learing New Orleans—cholera had been reported there—but four days out of port, Mary Elizabeth died. Her body was committed to the blue waters off the Florida coast.

Holy Thursday, 1978. The mountains are not old, as the ages of mountains are measured. Seventy million years ago—give or take a few million years—they were no more than rounded hills rising above the sediment-laden sea of the later Cretaceous Age. Then came the great uplift of the Laramide “revolution,” when most of western North America slowly emerged, with much cracking and faulting and spewing of volcanic fires, from the primordial waters. The soft hills rose to become the southern tongue of the American Rockies, curving down from Colorado into the north-central portion of New Mexico, their highest peaks topping out at more than thirteen thousand feet, carved and riven by wind, rain, and ice. In the long trough between them and the San Juan and Jemez mountains to the west, a trickle of water began cutting its way south to the Gulf of Mexico; it would become a river, and would be called the Rio Grande.

On the afternoon of September 18, 1915, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States and a widower, wrote a brief note that he knew might change the rest of his life. The note, sent by messenger, was for Edith Boiling Galt, to whom he was secretly engaged. The President asked her to cancel her plans to have dinner that evening at the White House, and to allow him the unusual liberty of coming to her home to discuss a matter of grave importance. Wilson had decided he must tell her, at whatever cost to their relationship, about a love affair with another woman.

On December 5, 1941, Natalie Crouler, an American housewife living in the Philippines, started a chatty letter to her mother in Boston: the children ‘s cat had died, and she described the tearful funeral. But the letter was never mailed. Within three chaotic weeks, the Crouter family were prisoners of the Japanese, trying to adjust to an internment that was to last more than three years.

Had one man’s grandiose vision been realized, the first sight to greet immigrants arriving in the New World after 1913 would not have been Bartholdi’s graceful, torch-bearing Goddess of Liberty, but something more nearly resembling the world’s largest cigar-store Indian.

At the entrance to New York Harbor, overlooking the Narrows from the heights of Staten Island and perched atop a seven-story pedestal, the mammoth figure of an Indian chief was to have been erected, his hand uplifted and two fingers extended in the “universal peace sign of the red man.” Towering 165 feet above a sprawling complex of museums, libraries, and formal gardens, he would have been the nation’s ultimate memorial to the “vanishing” North American Indian.

Everyone slept here but Washington. For nearly as long as there has been a national capital in the District of Columbia, there also has been a hotel on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street. The first was Fuller’s City Hotel, which was built in the early 1830’s and entertained the likes of Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore. In 1850, Fuller’s was purchased by onetime steamboat steward Henry A. Willard and his brothers, who rebuilt it, gave it their name, and reopened it with a suitably gala banquet; one of the speakers was the renowned Edward Everett, who intoned what must be one of the most intelligent remarks ever heard upon such occasions: “There are few duties in life,” he said, “that require less nerve than to come together and eat a good dinner.”

The last few years have seen the growth of what is known as “comparative advertising”: commercials that, rather than flogging a product with simple hyperbole, actually name competitors and specify their deficiencies. This trend has whipped up an enormous amount of controversy in the advertising industry, but in fact it is merely the timid revival of a century-old American circus tradition.

In an era when half a dozen circuses might play a large town in a season, the earlier arrivals had the advantage. Competitors posted advertisements—circus people called them “rat sheets”—in hopes of convincing would-be customers that the incoming show was a shabby fraud, and that they should save their money for a real circus. The untrammeled venom of these broadsides is astonishing to our libel-conscious era, but a few decades ago it was all in a day’s work for one circus owner publicly to call another a liar, a drunkard, an adulterer, a traitor, and a thief.

Judged by its direct and profound influence upon individual and collective lives, no social legislation in all American history is more important than the Social Security Act of August, 1935. And of no other New Deal measure is the legislative history more instructive for one who would understand the essential nature and central purpose of the Roosevelt administration, and the ways in which the mind, character, and temperament of Franklin D. Roosevelt had major shaping impact upon today’s America.

“Does the name David Ingram mean anything to you?” I have been going around asking. The answer is almost always no. Yet if Ingram is to be believed, he and two others with him accomplished perhaps the outstanding walk in recorded history. It seems undeniable that they were the first Englishmen to see anything of North America behind the coast, as certainly Ingram was the first to report on it. David B. Quinn, one of the few historians to have looked much into the case, offers in conjunction with his collaborators in The Discovery of North America —W. P. Gumming and R. A. Skelton—the opinion that while it “appears to be impossible” for the three Englishmen to have gone as far as Ingram said they did in the time available, “The basic fact of his journey and survival, however, is little open to question; this English sailor penetrated some part of the interior on a remarkable walking trip.” I am not so sure about that “impossible”—but then, despite the time I have given him, I am not so sure about anything involving Ingram. I seem to have been left in the midst of intractable, if fascinating, contradictions.

Bureaucratic prose is rarely praised. It was thus a considerable tribute when The New Yorker magazine carried this comment on the introduction of the Social Security program in the fall of 1936:

We don’t know who wrote the folder that accompanied the application blanks for old-age benefits, but it seems to us a good job of writing. The first sentence, “There is now a law in this country which will give about 26 million working people something to live on when they are old and have stopped working,” is something of a government record for simple, good English. It’s the sort of thing Abe Lincoln might have penned, if he’d thought of it. It carries the faint, troubling vibrations of great prose. And when we walked through the corridors of this office and saw people gathered in what the papers call knots and queues, we suspected that something important had happened in America. There was a more deepseated excitement than the day the girl upstairs won the sweepstakes money.