January 2011

For an example of the way an incident of the distant past can put a revealing light on a problem of today, you might care to spend a moment considering the case of the Swamp Angel.

The Swamp Angel was a rifled cannon in a sandbag battery built in a South Carolina swamp in the summer of 1863 when the United States Army was trying to batter its way into Charleston. To enter Charleston from the sea, which was the only possible way to do it, the army must first destroy Fort Sumter at the entrance to the harbor. To destroy Fort Sumter, it developed, it would be necessary to mount numerous guns in the surrounding swamps to supplement the naval bombardment. After a great deal of labor the army managed to build a number of batteries; among them, the Swamp Angel.

Jack London carved himself a special niche in the annals of American literature. Born in poverty in the first month of America’s centennial year, he spent his boyhood suffering the rejection of an unloving mother and much of his young manhood as a careless delinquent, a waterfront roisterer, and a road bum, quite as mindless of his own self-destruction as any modern youth who wastes himself with drugs and hitchhikes the interstates from nowhere to nowhere else.

London pulled himself out of poverty and psychic and physical ruin by writing, and by the time of his death in 1916 was the highest-paid writer of his time. He also was the best-known American writer of his time, for he was, by his own creation, a public figure, a man who put more of his genius into his life than into his work, even though his output as a writer was prodigious. He constructed a myth of himself as a hero battling against the elements, against drink and death, a frail superman always locked in a struggle for survival and success.

In early January, 1960, Adlai E. Stevenson received a puzzling telephone call at his Chicago law office from Mikhail A. Menshikov, the Soviet ambassador to the United States. Stevenson, who had been the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for President in 1952 and 1956 and was still titular head of the Democratic party, had stated more than once—although some of his friends were not convinced—that he did not intend to run for the Presidency a third time, in 1960.

As John Bartlow Martin reports in the final volume of his biography of Stevenson, Adlai Stevenson and the World , which Doubleday & Company will publish in October, Menshikov said that he had gifts and messages that Premier Khrushchev had sent to Stevenson via the embassy, and asked if he might come to Chicago to deliver them personally. Stevenson replied that he would instead call on the ambassador. The story of this peculiar, intriguing incident, which has never before been revealed, continues as told in Mr. Martin’s forthcoming biography:

All through the late spring and summer of 1894 a haze of woodsmoke hung over the town of Hinckley in Pine County, Minnesota. Small fires burned unheeded in the cutover timberlands throughout the county, throughout the whole eastern part of the state. In mid-July, section gangs of the St. Paul & Duluth Railroad were out fighting fires north and south of Hinckley, and they succeeded in getting the flames under control before the right-of-way was damaged. At about the same time, a correspondent for a St. Paul newspaper observed: “The fires around here are spreading rapidly, and everything is as dry as tinder. Unless a heavy rain comes soon there may be a great loss sustained.” Later, after the horror and the dying, those words would be remembered. But at the time all that the people in Hinckley and the nearby towns had on their minds was getting through the hottest, dryest summer any of them could remember.

Tallulah Bankhead called it “the most gruesomely named hotel in the western hemisphere.” Others, perhaps thinking of its curious architecture or the monumental hangovers that accompanied its boozy high life, called it simply the most gruesome hotel. To most of its denizens, however—to the scores of stars, writers, directors, wits, and wags who would stay nowhere else when they went to Los Angeles to “make a movie”—it symbolized Hollywood itself.

The Cold War—we have spent a generation hearing about it, thinking about it, worrying about it. We all know it somehow grew out of World War II, that it involved conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and that it led to a series of frightening confrontations: the Berlin airlift; the escalating stages of the nuclear arms race; the Cuban missile crisis; the wars in Korea and Vietnam. But what really caused the Cold War? It is not a simple question, and knowledgeable and honest men can differ considerably in answering it.

The election of a peanut-growing President has evoked much journalistic analysis of his rural Southern roots. One political observer credited an earlier peanut personality at a black school not far from Plains, Georgia, with “a more important role in Carter’s destiny than latter-day supporters like Andrew Young or Maynard Jackson or Martin Luther King, Sr.”

Writing in the Washington Post, Douglass Cater went on to recall how “George Washington Carver, born a slave, set up the primitive laboratory at the Tuskegee Institute to become ‘the father of chemurgy’ and ‘the Peanut Wizard,’ working in tandem with the boll weevil to rid the South of its dependence on the one-crop cotton economy.…Carver demonstrated that the lowly ‘goober’ not only could enrich soil exhausted by cotton growing…but held myriad commercial uses. Spurred by Dr. Carver, peanut farming transformed the economy of Sumter County and lifted the Carter family out of its hard-scrabble existence.”

He was a study in contrasts: an inventive genius who discovered the alternating-current system that lit up the world, hut an inept husinessman who died in poverty; an extrovert showman who dazzled audiences hy lighting without wire’s a bulb held in his hand, but a reclusive bachelor whose greatest love, he once confided, was a sickly pigeon he had nursed back to health. He was a pacifist, but dabbled with “death rays,” a writer of poems though he kept no written records of his experiments, a visionary who foresaw interstellar communication but disparaged Einstein’s theories.

His name was Nikola Tesla, and it is surprising, in view of his great contributions to mankind, that he still remains in the shadow of Thomas Edison.