The exacting, colorful, and often perilous career of a whaleman of the last century is known to most readers only through such fiction a Moby Dick . But many a real American went “down to the sea in ships” from East Coast whaling ports, experiencing the loneliness, exhilaration, and dangers that Herman Melville described. One of them was Robert Weir, a tormented nineteen-year-old, who in the summer of 1855 left his home in Cold Spring, New York, where he had worked in the local iron foundry. His father, Robert Walter Weir, was a noted painter who taught art at the military academy at West Point, across the Hudson River from Cold Spring.
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January 2011
The sunlight began to dim hours before sunset and the clean, fresh air acquired a peculiar density as a giant, black dust cloud approached from the northwest. More than a thousand feet high, the cloud swept southeast and extended in a straight line as far as the eye could see, rolling and tumbling like a great wall of muddy water. Hundreds of birds flew in panic before it.
“We are a religious people.…” The United States Supreme Court likes to quote this dictum by Justice William O. Douglas, who coined the phrase to accompany a decision in 1952. The Court has not been trying to provide America’s pious Little Jack Horners with new reasons to say, “What a good boy am I!” The justices are not supposed to favor particular religions or to discriminate against irreligion. They merely have been explaining why their legal decisions take into account the sentiments of so many citizens on the delicate subject of religion.
Mr. Abel and Ambassador Harriman may well be right in their understanding of the origins of the Cold War. I believe they are right in most of what they say in the first half of their comments, and, on some issues, I think they are making points that I was trying to make myself. For example, that the “fate of Poland… had been pretty much decided before Roosevelt and Churchill went to Yalta in February, 1945” is one thing I was attempting to express; that “as the Nazi threat diminished, so did the need for Allied cooperation” is another.
On other points, I believe Mr. Abel and the ambassador are mistaken:
People who have been turned out of their homes make keen historians. Forced from the land of their ancestors and onto the open road without a destination, they have a way of remembering—often to the minute of the day—the trauma of departure. Etched indelibly in their memories are the details: a frenetic packing; a final, hurried look around an abandoned house; a wistful, wishful fondling of familiar possessions that couldn’t be taken with them; then, if they were lucky and had wheels instead of just shoe leather and shoulders beneath their possessions, there was the wrenching moment of the last, silent, no-looks-back drive out to the nearest highway.
Why on earth would a band of seafaring Vikings have traveled all the way to Minnesota in the heart of North America in 1362? The notion that they did may seem absurd, but ever since the turn of the century many people have argued learnedly that it happened. They have based their claim largely on the Kensington Rune Stone, a flat rock incised with medieval Norse symbols that was allegedly discovered in 1898on the Kensington, Minnesota, farm of a Swedish-American settler named Olaf Ohman.
Sooner or later, the last report of a bicenO ten niai aberration will reach us. Until then, we continue to feel it a moral obligation to keep our readersin touch with some of the stranger things that went on out there during the country’s two hundredth birthday.
During the behind-the-scenes infighting and debate that preceded President Harry Truman’s decision to recognize the new state of Israel in 1948, as recounted by Clark M. Clifford in our April, 1977, issue, so much pressure was put on Truman that for a time he refused to see any Zionists, including the ailing Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who was soon to become Israel’s first president and had journeyed to America to plead with Truman for recognition. But on March 12, Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s old friend and former business partner in Kansas City, Missouri, called on the President in the White House to intercede for Weizmann. Four years later, Jacobson described the meeting in a letter he wrote to Dr. Josef Cohn of the Industrial Institute of Israel. A copy of that heretofore unpublished letter was recently sent to us by Loeb H. Granof, whose father. A. J. Granof, was a friend of both Cohn and Jacobson. as well as of Truman.