January 2011

During the summer of 1893, Americans riveted their attention on the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Andrew Borden was being tried for the gruesome ax murder of her father and stepmother. All other news paled in comparison, for here, in southeastern Massachusetts, not only a particular woman, but the entire Victorian conception of womanhood, was on trial for its life.

The drama began in August of 1892 at Number 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, the home of Andrew Jackson Borden, whose family coat of arms prophetically bore a lion holding a battle-ax. The household consisted of Andrew, seventy; Abby Gray Borden, sixty-five, his wife; his two daughters, Lizzie Andrew and Emma Lenora, aged thirty-two and forty-two; and Bridget Sullivan, twenty-six, an Irish servant who had been with the family for nearly three years.

It is easy to doubt this. We are skeptics in an age that demands skepticism, an age in which the cynic has the idealist locked in a cage. It is a bad time to look back and a worse time to look ahead. And yet…

Visitors to Monticello today, taking in its handsome lawns and flower beds, its beautifully finished and furnished rooms, its immaculate floors and woodwork, have no trouble picturing Thomas Jefferson entertaining such luminaries as Lafayette and Washington on these elegant premises. Yet if they could suddenly turn back the clock a hundred years, they would witness an astonishing and shocking transformation. In 1878 there were pigpens among a jungle of weeds on the front lawn; loose shutters banged in the wind before broken windows; bins of grain cluttered the otherwise empty drawing room; the back portico was so nearly buried beneath dirt and rubbish that horses and cattle could go right into the house; and clumps of grass sprouted among the splintered shingles of the leaky roof.

A few years ago, I stood in a sandy, dry creek bottom in northern Nevada, not far from the Black Rock Desert, a hundred miles from civilization. With me were two rangers from the Bureau of Land Management’s Reno office. It had taken us several hours to reach this place, and it was now late afternoon; the shadows were long, and a chill wind muttered through the clumps of sage and creosote bush that dotted the land about. On either side of us jumbles of huge, dark boulders rose perhaps forty feet to the lip of the flat above the creek bed, like walls constructed by gigantic, incompetent stonemasons. On the boulders, along a stretch of perhaps a hundred yards, were messages from another time.

Among the most common mechanical possessions in the households of America, outnumbering even the motor vehicle and possibly outnumbered itself only by the flush toilet and the television set, is a device which, having won the West and championed liberty over the years, some householders would now proscribe as the instrument of our collective undoing. In short, the gun. I mean rifles, shotguns, pistols, and revolvers, at least 150,000,000 of them tucked away in bureau drawers and attic cupboards or racked splendidly above mantel-pieces.

Our “Postscripts” feature “Of Cruel and Unusual Death Sentences” in the October, 1977, issue called forth an unusual run of mail from readers. The item had to do with an 1881 death sentence passed down by an anonymous (we assumed) judge on the luckless José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, a sentence that combined eloquence and racist venom in about equal portions. At the end of the feature, we wondered if any of our readers could enlighten us as to the origins of this singular example of jurisprudential excess.

They could indeed. While the name of the defendant has come down to us variously as José Maria Martin, José Maniah, and José Maria Martinez, most of our respondents agreed that he was a Mexican sheepherder who had killed a local cowboy in New Mexico over a disputed card game. Some recounted the legend that the accused later escaped jail and died some years afterward when he fell off a horse. Almost all attributed the death sentence itself to the infamous Judge Isaac ("Hanging Judge") Parker, a jurist, it was said, who would string up a man quite as cheerfullv as he would kill flies. And as often.

The fences have come down all across Missouri. Fields in Iowa are no longer necessarily rectangular; within their Jeffersonian boundaries, many follow the lay of the land. In flat western Kansas they are often circular to accommodate the center-pivot self-propelled pipes that irrigate them. Where cotton reigned in the South, cattle now are fed, and soybeans, which once were spurned as useless everywhere in rural America or were plowed under for green manure, darken the fields of summer. Corn, wheat, cattle, and hogs change shape and variety, go hybrid with vigor; lamb is scarce as lobster; poultry are hardly farmed any more-one might say they are factoried.

The curious table shown opposite, with its montage of hand-painted scenes, commemorates a grand financial debacle in eighteenth-century France that was commonly known as the Mississippi Bubble. The bubble was blown by John Law, a native of Scotland whose brain worked like a computer and who for a couple of years was the most powerful man in the French government with the possible exception of the Duc d’Orléans, regent for the boy-king Louis XV.

Those who remember Thomas J.Fleming’s “The Policeman’s Lot,” which we published in February, 1970, may recall that the author quoted from a then-recent issue of a newsmagazine to the effect that “the average cop feels that he is unappreciated or even actively disliked by the public he serves.” In the article, Fleming went on to note, among other things, that just such a sense of alienation has always been the policeman’s lot, by the very nature of his job.

Undoubtedly, that will continue to be the case for years to come—although possibly not for all policemen everywhere. In Seattle’s Pioneer Square district, for example, six patrolmen and one sergeant have been decked out in turn-of-thecentury uniforms; three of them are seen—below right—with Candice Leach, executive secretary of the Pioneer Square Association. The Seattle “Pioneer Squad” was the idea of Mayor Wes Uhlman and Chief of Police Robert L. Hanson. It was formed in 1975, and the policemen march along in their 1910 uniforms from Memorial Day to Labor Day each year.

When the last fireworks had faded, the VV last parade had ended, the last watermelon had been eaten, and the last echoes of the last speech had died out in the county fairgrounds of the land, most Bicentennial committees of 1976 heaved sighs of relief and closed up shop, with never a thought for the morrow.

Not so the Bicentennial committee of Wyoming, Pennsylvania. Finding itself with $63 left in its Bicentennial account at the end of the year’s festivities, this admirable body persuaded a local bank to contribute another $100, then put the money into a special TVtcentennial account. Bank officials calculate that at today’s interest rates the $163 deposited this year will be worth about $100,000 by 2076, which ought to be enough to finance a couple of truly nifty paradesassuming that inflation rates have not eaten it alive by then.