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January 2011

When it comes to the performing arts, Americans have often suffered from a sense of cultural inferiority. Foreign artists are considered somehow better—more glamorous, more gifted, more refined—than our own. We have lavished our applause on the likes of Bernhardt, Burton, and Garbo, reserved our stormiest bravos for Paderewski, Chaliapin, and Nureyev, and lost our national composure over Lola Montez, Anna Held, and the Beatles. In the nineteenth century, American opera companies drew best when billed as Italian; even today American performers frequently find it pays to conquer Europe before wowing them in Omaha. The late Sol Hurok was the most successful modern impresario to profit from this fascination with foreign stars. But his triumphs paled-as did those of all his predecessors and their exotic imports—when compared to what happened in 1850 when P. T. Barnum brought the Swedish singer Jenny Lind to America.

In the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the American physicist and scientist-statesman who directed the building of the first atomic bombs at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II, whose government, discerning “fundamental defects” in his character, denied him security clearance in 1954, who died of throat cancer in 1967— some have professed to see embodied the moral ambiguities of twentieth-century science, science charging breakneck over human institutions, scientists waking compromised from Faustian dreams. These are tabloid notions, but Oppenheimer did live at the center of the century’s most disturbing contradictions, and struggled with them, and suffered for them, and if he is often taken as their protagonist, it is partly because he was a man of disturbing contradictions himself.

In 1693 the people of New York had more to worry about than a fiscal crisis, as the newly revealed documents on these pages attest. The British colonies were in the fourth year of King William’s War—a bloody struggle that had already seen fierce wilderness fighting and the savage destruction of Schenectady by the French and their Algonquian allies. Now New Yorkers feared that a daring blow was to be aimed against Manhattan. Benjamin Fletcher, the royal governor, called upon the citizenry to rally to the colony’s defense, store up provisions, and pray for the success of English arms. The expected assault never materialized, but the colony remained jittery until the Peace of Ryswick officially ended hostilities between England and France in 1697.

In the early fall of 1918 five hundred American infantrymen were cut off from their regiment and surrounded by Germans during five days of fighting in the Argonne Forest. Though they would be forever remembered as the Lost Battalion, they were not really a battalion and they were never lost. “We knew exactly where we were,” one of them said later. “So did the Germans.” The only nearby Americans uncertain about the location of the trapped band of riflemen and machine gunners were their own division’s artillery officers, who bombarded them with heavy shellfire for two terrifying hours during the second day of the siege.

Don’t ever tell me that a woman cannot be called to preach the Gospel,” she once wrote. “If any man ever went through one hundredth the part of k hell on earth that I Iived in, they would never say that again.” If hell was the hopelessness of poverty, Aimee Semple McPherson had been there. But she preached her way out of those depths, and by the time of her death had ascended into a heaven of wealth and power.

Millions of readers have been pleasured by the writings of John Steinbeck, but there was no joy in the Atlanta headquarters of the Coca-Cola Company when the Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist’s The Wayward Bus reached the executive suite.

”‘You rather have a coke?’ ” asked the traveling salesman who was trying to move in on the blonde at the bus stop lunchroom.

”‘No. Coffee’ ” she replied. ” ‘Cokes make me fat.’ ”

”‘Got any coke?’ ” another character asked.

”‘No,’ ” said the proprietor. ”‘Few bottles of Pepsi-Cola. Haven’t had any coke for a month. It’s the same stuff. You can’t tell them apart.’”

We Americans pride ourselves on our sophistication. We like to think that we are worldly-wise and cynical. We shed our milk teeth long ago, and if anyone appeals to our better impulses our instinctive response is to ask: Well, now, what’s his angle?

It is a good pose, most of the time, and succeeding generations of sophomores have found it most effective. The trouble is that we can’t keep it up. One of the enduring traits in the American character is the broad idealistic strain that was built in far back in the past, and it keeps coming to the surface when we least expect it. When this happens we feel embarrassed and try to act as if it were not happening.

Albert Spalding’s middle name was Goodwill, which seemed fitting in 1888 when the baseball impresario and sporting goods king decided to take the game on a grand tour to parts of the world as yet unexposed to the glories of the American national pastime. His own Chicago White Stockings and an All America team drawn from both professional leagues would play exhibition games around the globe. As the group sailed from San Francisco, a journalist envisioned “Baseball at Calcutta and Bombay, or on the Island of Ceylon, where the branches of the sacred Bo tree might form a natural grandstand. Perhaps the serene Lord of all the Earth, the Emperor of Siam, may invite the party to his court; and should he be pleased with the game, he will no doubt present Mr.

There are 3,101 county courthouses in the United States, and a lot of history has happened in them. Abraham Lincoln was just one of hundreds of small-town lawyers who first made their marks in county courthouses, and scores of celebrated trials—from Lizzie Borden to Patty Hearst—have taken place inside them. Most of us have humbler courthouse errands—to file a deed, argue about a tax assessment, or buy a dog license.

Some of the buildings seem, wonderfully incongruous now—ornate Renaissancestyle palaces lording it over tiny cow towns; others are sadly anachronistic—turreted medieval fortresses in the bigger county seats, now dwarfed by glass and steel neighbors. Nor are they as central to our lives as they once were, since much of their power has leached away to state capitals and to Washington.

But they are still staunch hometown symbols of our faith in our ability to govern ourselves—and sometimes, too, of one county’s determination to outshine the next.

In the still of the October night, the slender, birdlike plane lifted into the sky from its base in California, climbed sharply on a column of flame, and headed east through the darkness. Pilot Richard Heyser, in the cramped, tiny cockpit, had good reason to be apprehensive, but he had little time to worry. He was totally occupied with the intricacies of navigation and with the exacting task of keeping his sleek aircraft aloft; for this plane was so specialized, so refined, that in the rarefied atmosphere that was its element it hung in the sky only tentatively, as if suspended from a wisp of spider’s silk. As the plane climbed above fifty thousand feet it entered a critical altitude level called the “chimney.” Once in the chimney, if the pilot flew a shade too slow, the plane would go into a stall and a spin from which it would never recover. If he flew a shade too fast, the fragile craft would come apart in mid-air.

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