January 2011

With American Heritage approaching its 50th birthday in December 2004, we’ve asked five prominent historians and cultural commentators to each pick ten leading developments in American life during the last half-century. In this issue, Paul Berman, a contributing editor to The New Republic and the author of Terror and Liberalism, published by W. W. Norton & Company, selects the ten biggest changes in the American home and family life. In other issues this year, our writers offer their choices of the half century’s biggest transformations in politics, popular culture, business, and innovation and technology.

What have been the ten greatest changes in American home and family life during the last half-century? I think that the first of these changes has turned out to be the deepest of all—the change that set into motion all the other changes, the prime mover. This was, oddly enough, the change mandated by the Supreme Court in its 1954 ruling on . . .

They call it a slave pen, but it’s really a cage. the wooden structure, 20 by 30 feet and two stories high, imprisoned slaves who had been bought by a Kentucky dealer until he could dispose of them. Inside, men were chained in place, while women could move about, cooking in a fireplace and doing their best to deal with the tight quarters, tiny windows, and complete lack of sanitation. The pen, later converted to a barn, was bought and restored by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center , in Cincinnati, and will form the centerpiece of that museum when it opens on August 23. Other exhibits will tell the story of the secret network that helped 50,000 slaves escape to freedom and of the people who risked their lives to keep it running. In keeping with the second part of its name, the museum will also examine issues in freedom and human rights worldwide, past and present, and encourage visitors to take action in their own communities. For more information, see the center’s Web site, www.freedomcenter.org.

It may be apocryphal, but the legend persists that Benito Mussolini banned the Marx Brothers’ 1933 antiwar film Duck Soup from being shown in Italy. If he didn’t, he should have. The word subversive has been much devalued by overuse, but surely no comics were more worthy of the label than the Marxes. No one else has ever been able to approach their combination of anarchy and method or match their range of appeal. The Farrelly brothers, God help us, have announced that they intend to re-create the Three Stooges, but outside of sketch comedy and the like, no one has dared, or ever will dare, to re-create Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and (sometimes, though not in their new DVD set) Zeppo. The Marx Brothers have never gone out of fashion and never will; they were simply, for a short while, unavailable.

Anyone interested in the controversy over the use of atomic bombs against Japan should read Enola Gay and the Court of History , by Robert P. Newman (Peter Lang, 220 pages, $26.00). For years Newman has pitted his scholarship against Hiroshima revisionists, who maintain that Japan was willing to surrender as early as the spring of 1945, provided it could retain its Emperor, and that Harry S. Truman and his advisers knew this but wanted the war to continue until the bombs became available. Supposedly, the real reason for using the bombs was to deploy “atomic diplomacy” against the Soviet Union, and officials conspired to mislead the American people by falsely claiming that they had acted to prevent massive casualties on both sides.

Generations of summer campers have whiled away rainy days plaiting leather or plastic cords into lanyards or other ornamental gadgets known as boondoggles—a harmless enough activity. In politics, though, boondoggle has become an attack term for government programs that are regarded (by the speaker or writer) as frivolous, wasteful, unnecessary, or designed to siphon off public funds for private benefit.

Of course, one person’s boon can be another’s boondoggle. Thus Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, told readers of The Wall Street Journal last November that he “was in Congress long enough to know how demonstration projects really work. For liberal spending boondoggles, they become entrenched parts of the federal government. But, on needed reforms, demonstration projects mean a quiet, obscure death.” Or as a letter writer to the Washington Post contended on January 21 this year: “NASA’s decision to cancel the Hubble telescope program to free up money for President Bush’s moonMars boondoggle is sickening.”

With the advent of an impressive exhibition devoted to Alexander Hamilton, the editors asked Richard Brookhiser, a biographer of Hamilton and the historian curator of the show, how he went about rendering his subject in three dimensions.

Alexander Hamilton lived by the pen. He published his first journalism, a description of a hurricane, when he was a teenager in his native West Indies, and he wrote his last political advice, a letter pleading for national unity, the night before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. The Federalist papers (51 out of 85 by him) are in every good bookstore and on many college reading lists. How do you explain such a verbal man in the visual medium of a museum exhibition? On September 10 the NewYork Historical Society will commemorate its own bicentennial, and the bicentennial of Hamilton’s death, by opening “Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America” (the show will be up through February 2005 and then go on tour).

The best book, Toy and Miniature Sewing Machines (in two volumes), by Glenda Thomas, is out of print, so you’ll have to look to used-book sources to find it or go online for information. The International Sewing Machine Collectors’ Society has a good Web site to start at, www.ismacs.net.

Isaac Merritt Singer devised the first commercially viable sewing machine, in 1850; by the time of his death in 1875, his company’s annual sales exceeded 500,000 machines. Not long afterward miniature sewing machines began to appear.

Model names like Baby, Junior Miss, and Little Lady indicate that they were designed for youngsters, but marketers shrewdly pitched them to adults as well. A 1926 magazine ad stated that Singer’s No. 20 was “so easy to set up and use that both you and mother will find it convenient for quick sewing. And it is so small and compact that you can tuck it in the corner of a bag or trunk for use on trips or vacations.”

Though minis were often called “toy” sewing machines, they were also sold as effective household tools. “This machine is not a toy or experiment, but . . . does the work of the regular chain stitch machines, which are usually very high priced,” the 1903 Sears, Roebuck catalogue said of the Perfection Automatic, which cost $2.00 or $3.50, depending on the version.

Grand Motel The Buyable Past To Learn More The Father of Us All Why Do We Say That? Hiroshima Re-Reconsidered Screenings On The Road To Freedom