January 2011

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.

A man may have as bad a heart as he chooses, if his conduct is within the rules.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought we hate.

No result is easy which is worth having.

Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.

I cannot for a moment believe that, apart from the Eighteenth Amendment, special constitutional principles exist against strong drink. The fathers of the Constitution, so far as I know, approved it.

Historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.

There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.

In his later years he was such a portly, affable-looking man that it is difficult to imagine him being responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of young men. Nevertheless, this picturesque old fellow developed the first truly efficient machine gun, tirelessly promoted it to an indifferent Europe, and lived to see it change the course of modern warfare.

Hiram Stevens Maxim was born near Sangerville, Maine, in 1840. The eldest of eight children, he grew to be a tall, strong, handsome boy whose parents, one of his brothers ruefully remarked, thought him “the great King Bee of the world.” After less than five years of schooling, Maxim went to work for a carriage maker with the Dickensian name of Daniel Sweat, who made him put in a sixteen-hour day for a monthly wage of four dollars’ worth of trade at local stores. Though this grueling experience did nothing to temper his lifelong hatred for labor leaders, Maxim soon tired of it; he had found he was good with his hands, and he drifted around the Northeast and Canada, taking on various odd jobs and starting to tinker with inventions.

On the theory, perhaps, that there is safety in numbers, it is possible to have a honeymoon in the company of five hundred couples doing exactly the same thing. In the Poconos of eastern Pennsylvania, a hilly region some thirty miles west of the Delaware Water Gap, there are eight hotels with names like Cove Haven and Paradise Stream, which have the appearance and facilities of regular resorts but which cater exclusively to honeymooners.

The efficient categorization of people today isolates single people in bars and apartments, puts old people out to feed in the sun, and now is segregating young newlyweds in easy-to-process groups. As with much of American life, the governing principle behind these eight Pocono resorts is the division of labor, the same idea that is responsible for auto shops which install only mufflers and surgeons who extract only wisdom teeth. These hotels are the culmination of the honeymoon’s long and peculiar history in this country.

Lost Tribes and Promised Landsi The Origins of American Racism The Faustball Tunnel, German POWs in America and Their Great Escape The States and the Nation The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics

No monument or institution has more power to stir the patriotic emotions of Americans, or evokes more poignintly the martial virtues of self-sacrifice and discipline, than the United States Military Academy at West Point. In the view of General George S. Patton, Jr., of the class of 1909, whose statue now belligerently confronts the academy library, West Point was “a holy place and I can never think of it without reverence and affection.” A general less given to extravagant speech or gestures, Lucius D. Clay, who commanded United States troops in Europe in the late 1940’s, said he regarded each trip back to West Point as “a pilgrimage to seek inspiration which renews faith.” In times of domestic disarray, academy graduates have gone so far as to suggest that if Americans were to be saved from themselves and their enemies, they would have to look to West Point for their salvation. “The time has come when … only the military virtues hold the key to national and governmental authority and obedience to law,” an elderly alumnus, Abbott Boone, told a West Point founder’s dinner in 1969.

A penny pincher who gave away millions, a governor who ordered the state’s flags lowered to half-mast upon his dog’s death, a lifelong bachelor who was the attentive escort of beautiful women, an animal lover who sent stray dogs to prison as companions for the inmates—Percival Proctor Baxter of Maine (1876–1969) was a true Yankee original. There is no evidence that he ever held any opinion mildly. He was also a visionary, a resolute one who had to buy his dream to have it realized. What this singular and complex man coveted was Maine’s highest peak, Mt. Katahdin, and the two hundred thousand acres of deep North Woods surrounding it that eventually became Baxter State Park, to be preserved “forever wild” for the people of Maine, whom he served as legislator and, from 1921 to 1925, as governor. The project took nearly half a century, and it cost him political support as well as a great deal of money, but it stands in America today as one of the shining milestones along the road of progress in conservation. As soon as you enter the vast solitary tract, you are aware of that utter stillness which is the surest test of unsullied wilderness.

The most dramatic and tragic moment of the American Civil War was the climactic point of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg on the afternoon of July 3, 1863. This doomed assault brought the Southern Confederacy to what looked like the verge of triumph, broke up in dust and fire, and put the armies on the road that led inevitably to the surrender field at Appomattox. Nothing in all the war has been written about so exhaustively.

How it was: it is late Sunday afternoon, mother and father in the front of the car, the children crowded into the back like puppies in a box. We are returning from a weekend at the beach, wind-blown and sunburned, sweating, itching, fidgeting, and cantankerous. Twice, father has had to stop the car, turn around in the seat, and fix us all with a baleful glare. But now it is six o’clock. The car radio is turned on, and no one needs to be told to keepquiet. It is The Great Gildersleeve . After that, it will be The Shadow , and by the time we turn into our driveway, we should be halfway through the Jack Benny show. Later yet, it will be Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, One Man’s Family , Fred Allen.…That was more than thirty years ago, but for most of our generation, the voices, the laughter, and the songs are still with us, fast in our memory and on the air forever.

Marjorie Daw Johnson, for many years a vocational teacher in Madison, Wisconsin, died in 1975 at the age of ninety-three. Among other mementos, she left this account of her entirely unforeseen experience as a courier to the Soviet Union in the days before the United States recognized that country. It is published here for the first time by permission of Dr. David B. Johnson, her nephew and executor of her estate.

In 1926 I began making plans to travel in Europe the following summer. Articles in some of our biggest newspapers had been devoting so much space to Russia that I thought it must be worth seeing. So, being, like the elephant’s child, “full of satiable curiosity,” I decided to also go there in the summer of 1927.