As Frank Kintrea noted in his article on Tuxedo Park in the August/September, 1978, issue, that once-posh enclave of the very, very rich has lately been struggling to maintain what the Tuxedo Park Association has called a “creative tension” between the exclusivity of the past and the rampant democratization that threatens it on nearly every side. However creative the tension may be, author Kintrea wrote, “there seems no place for Tuxedo Park to go socially except down.”
Charles Dickens apparently found little to beguile him when he visited Philadelphia in the 1840’s. He gave scarcely a page to the city in his American Notes , and was sourly amused at being overcome with “Quakery feelings,” which manifested themselves in an urge to invest in the corn exchange. But when he got to the banks of the Schuylkill, he was deeply impressed: “Philadelphia is most bountifully provided with fresh water, which is showered and jerked about, and turned on, and poured off, everywhere. The [Fairmount] Waterworks … are no less ornamental than useful, being tastefully laid out as a public garden, and kept in the best and neatest order. The river is dammed at this point, and forced by its power into certain high tanks or reservoirs, whence the whole city, to the top stories of the houses, is supplied at a very trifling expense.”
The Nashville winter of 1974 was the Grand Ole Opry’s last season at the Ryman Auditorium, its home for thirty-three years. The 150 singers, pickers, comics, and doggers, who must agree to make twenty-one appearances each year to become members of the Opry company, had agreed to play down any misgivings they might have about moving out to the new Opryland, and four- and five-color brochures urged: “Come Share the Wonder of OPRYLAND , U.S.A., where the best of country music blends with the strains of Bluegrass, Dixieland, Western, Rock and all of the other exciting sounds of music from this great wide country of ours.”
In a field outside of Gettysburg on a hot July morning in 1863 a frightened Michigan teen-ager named Frank Pearson stood on a stump, trading shots with a Confederate cavalryman 125 yards away. The first two exchanges had drawn no blood, and Pearson was having trouble getting another round into his carbine. Ingenuously, he held up his hand, signaling time out. His opponent, the richest man in the South and possibly the Confederacy’s finest horse soldier, gravely lifted his pistol to the sky until Pearson had finished reloading.
That kind of courtesy was an essential part of Wade Hampton; so, too, was the cool steadiness that allowed him to shatter Pearson’s wrist with his next shot. For Hampton was the epitome of the ante-bellum Southern gentleman—generous, loyal, unquestioning in his dedication to his society, and a consummate fighting man. And he was more; almost alone in the bloody turmoil of Reconstruction, he advocated moderation and black suffrage. His fellow South Carolinians listened to him only for a little while, but when they did, they won back their state.
The mothers of my childhood friends paid special attention to me, and I never understood why. I was dimly aware that something about me made them pat my shoulder and murmur sympathetically or, on the other hand, quite as inscrutably, bar me from their homes and keep their children from visiting me. Grown-up behavior was difficult to fathom, and I did not question it.
I never connected it with the fact that my mother suffered from tuberculosis.
It was not until I was grown and my mother was gone that I came to understand the dread the very word “tuberculosis” engendered in people’s minds in the late nineteen twenties and early thirties. I came myself to fear it, the natural result of years of anxious looks and repeated warnings to wash my hands, stand back, avoid infection. “Do you think I have it yet?” I once asked my older brother, who replied coldly, “I don’t know. It’s like water wearing away a stone.”
On March 3,1879, two years into the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Forty-fifth Congress reluctantly created two new federal bureaus. One, the United States Geological Survey, consolidated under the Department of the Interior three existing Western surveys led by John Wesley Powell, F. V. Hayden, and Lieutenant George Wheeler. (A fourth, Clarence King’s survey of the Fortieth Parallel, had finished its field work and was preparing to close up shop.) The other, the Bureau of Ethnology, later called the Bureau of American Ethnology, and now folded into the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology, concentrated under the wing of the Smithsonian Institution the previously random and uncorrelated study of America’s native tribes.
The roots of jazz, perhaps the most American of all our arts, curl back to almost everywhere: to the west coast of Africa, first of all, but then to Europe, to the Caribbean, to the Appalachians, to the work songs of the levees and cotton fields and the rolling Gospel music of a thousand Baptist churches scattered across the South.