By far the most popular place to go for a preinduction physical was Seattle, Washington. In the latter years of the war, Seattle examiners separated people into two groups: those who had letters from doctors or psychiatrists, and those who did not. Everyone with a letter received an exemption, regardless of what the letter said.
COPYRIGHT © 1978 BY LAWRENCE M. BASKIR AND WILLIAM A. STRAUSS
In August, 1974, when President Gerald Ford assumed office, one of his first acts was to appoint a nine-member President Clemency Board to administer, case by case, his program of condition clemency for men convicted of draft offenses and desertion during the Vietnam War. The board’s work took about a year. When it was finished, the Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh of Notre Dame felt that the surprising and “monumental evidence” he and his fellow board members had assembled should be made public, not just as a formal governmental report, but also as a book more readily accessible to the American people. The Ford Foundation provided the needed funds, and two members of the group, Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, have now written Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War and the Vietnam Generation , which will be published later this month by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The following article is an excerpt from this important study.
When John Trumbull, the celebrated artist of the American Revolution, was living in London in 1789, he received this pleasant message from an acquaintance in Paris: “If he [William Short] goes, would you like his office of private secretary? It’s duties consist almost solely in copying papers, and were you to do this yourself it would only occupy now and then one of your evenings: and if you did not chuse to do it yourself, you can hire it for so many sous a sheet. … The salary is 300 pounds sterling a year which is paid by the public. I have given Mr. Short his lodgings and board, and should do the same to you with great pleasure. I think it will not take a moment of your time from your present pursuit. Perhaps it might advantage that by transferring it for a while to Paris, and perhaps it may give you an opportunity of going to Italy; as your duties performed by another during your absence would cost a very little part of your salary. Think of this proposition, my dear Sir, and give me your answer as soon as you can decide to your satisfaction. …”
This is the story of a sturdy American symbol which has now-spread throughout most of the world. The symbol is not the dollar. It is not even Coca-Cola. It is a simple pair of pants called blue jeans, and what the pants symbolize is what Alexis de Tocqueville called “a manly and legitimate passion for equality. …” Blue jeans are favored equally by bureaucrats and cowboys; bankers and deadbeats; fashion designers and beer drinkers. They draw no distinctions and recognize no classes; they arc merely American. Yet they are sought after almost everywhere in the world—including Russia, where authorities recently broke up a teen-aged gang that was selling them on the black market for two hundred dollars a pair. They have been around for a long time, and it seems likely that they will outlive even the necktie.
This ubiquitous American symbol was the invention of a Bavarian-born Jew, seen above in the 1850’s (the San Francisco headquarters of the company he founded is shown next to him, in a photograph taken in 1882). His name was Levi Strauss.
In chronicling the Jenny Lindomania that gripped America during the soprano’s triumphal U.S. tour in 1850-51 (our October, 1977, issue), we featured an array of colorful period objects—from fans and paper dolls to five-cent cigarsadorned with her name and face.
Now reader Anthony Peluso of Yonkers, New York, reminds us of another, grander tribute to the Swedish Nightingale. In August, 1851, Jenny and her entourage slipped aboard Captain Albert DeGroot’s Hudson River steamboat, the Reindeer , supposedly incognito. But according to the Democratic Journal of Kingston, New York, the other passengers immediately recognized her: “The excitement was very great, and for a part of the passage Capt. DeGroot tendered her his private saloon. … In grateful appreciation of the courtesies extended to her, Jenny Lind, upon her arrival at Albany, presented Capt. DeGroot with an elegant diamond breast pin.”
In a caption accompanying “The Most Extraordinary and Astounding Ad- venture of the Civil War” in our December, 1977, issue, we essayed a description of the Confederate engine” … Yankee , one of the three locomotives commandeered for the chase. …” As a number of readers have pointed out, neither the article nor any evidence known to man suggests the existence of the Yankee ; the locomotive in question was the Texas. Lapsus gratuitus!
Among the paintings that accompanied the whaler’s diary in our August, 1977, issue was this view of a tethered sperm whale being carved up alongside the New Bedford bark Catalpa . All in a day’s work.
But a more dramatic role played by the Catalpa has been called to our attention by reader William J. Laubenstein (author of The Emerald Whaler , Bobbs-Merrill, 1960). The sight of the ship in our pages, he writes, “brought grand memories to Irish Americans of the older generation. For the Catalpa … tweaked the tail of the British lion as it had never been tweaked before.”
Ever since “The Star-Spangled Banner” became our national anthem, Americans have been risking damage to their larynxes by straining to meet the musical demands of “o’er the la-and of the freeeee . …” Now, at last, it appears we know who to blame for the torturous notes.
In “Marks for the Marketplace: The Curious World of the Trademark,” which appeared in our October, 1977, issue, author Gerald Carson outlined the deadly serious corporate view of those who violate, however innocently, proper usage of trademark names: “Many firms have standard letters ready to be sent when necessary to writers, the distributors that handle their merchandise, the general public, and lexicographers, thanking them politely for their interest in the product but chiding them for sinning against the law of trademarks.”
We prefer the response of the Xerox Corporation, as reflected in the text of one of its recent magazine advertisements:
“Dust was the color of the sky.
“Dust was the color of the town.
“The young sheriff moved toward the railway platform, pausing only to wipe his moist palms on his holsters.