January 2011

For more than thirty years it stood at the corner of Highland Avenue and Del Rosa Avenue in San Bernardino, California, bordered at the rear by a line of eucalyptus trees and behind that by a thirty-acre grove of fat green trees that joined others in a march to the foothills of the San Bernardino Range. It billed itself as “The World’s Largest Orange Juice Stand,” and perhaps it was. It was big enough—a monstrous globe about sixty feet in diameter, constructed of plaster and chicken wire over a rickety wooden framework and painted a glistening orange. For a mile or so before you came to it, crude signs along the sides of the roads announced its presence, though they were hardly necessary; rising high above the groves, the stand could be seen for at least two miles.

The article beginning on the preceding pages was read by Mr. Clifford to a joint session of the American Historical Association and the American Jewish Historical Society in Washington, D.C., on December 28, 1976. Shortly afterward, Bernard A. Weisberger, a Contributing Editor of this magazine, interviewed Mr. Clifford for AMERICAN HERITAGE to elaborate on some of the details of his article. A transcript from Mr. Weisberger’s notes (no tape recording was made) follows:

Mr. Clifford, why didyou write this article at this particular time?

Doc Kearns, Dempsey’s hustling manager, fought bitterly with the champion later in his career, and, as was his way, showered abuse on his former protege. The two men never really made up. In fact, the last piece of nastiness that Doc tossed at Jack came virtually from the grave. Shortly before Kearns died in 1963, he had completed the manuscript for his autobiography. In talking about the Willard fight, Kearns described how he had started worrying about the $ 10,000 he had bet on a first-round victory, and how he had decided to help the results along. Unknown to his fighter, he asserted, he had sprinkled the wrappings that go under a boxer’s gloves with plaster of Paris, and had then doused them with water before lacing on Jack’s gloves.

DINERS used to be everywhere. Since the turn of the century the long, low, oddly cheery buildings have been the restaurants of the working class. But now that’s all changed, and the traditional diner, once an inescapable fixture of the American landscape, is hovering on the verge of extinction.

The diner first appeared, in the form of a lunch wagon, on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1872. In that era, every restaurant in town closed at 8 P.M. It occurred to Walter Scott, a man whose entire previous experience as a restaurateur had been confined to selling pies from a basket, to load a covered express wagon with food and park it outside the offices of the Providence Journal. And there he stayed, every night from dusk until two in the morning, for the next forty-five years, selling sandwiches and boiled eggs to the compositors for a nickel, and sliced chicken to the “dude trade” for thirty cents.

William Harnson, better known as Jack, Dempsey, a bruising heavyweight prize fighter from Manassa, Colorado, had been fighting for eleven years when, in igiff, he managed to get a crack at the world championship title. Under the ßamboyant and often unscrupulous management of Jack “Doc” Kearns, Dempsey had piled up an impressive string of wins—often first-round knockouts—and Jess Willard, the mountainous, 36-year-old champion, had finally been cajoled and bullied into defending his title against the aggressive 24-yearold. Today, Jack Dempsey, eighty-one years old, tells the story ofthat historic and brutal fight and of a time when boxing was rougher and seamier than it is now. His new autobiography, Dempsey, from which the following excerpt is adapted, has been written with the help of his stepdaughter, Barbara Piattelli Dempsey, and will be published by Harper & Row this month.

If Ambrose Bierce, America’s first exponent of black humor, crudest epigrammist, and most terrifying teller of horror tales, is now finally coming into his own, it is because thinking Americans are finally recognizing the relevance of his vision—that America is not the Peaceable Kingdom and its citizens are no less aggressive, fearful, pretentious, and greedy than all other members of the human race.

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce, the tenth child of Marcus Aurelius Bierce and Laura Sherwood Bierce, was born on June 24, 1842, in the Western Reserve, at the Horse Cave Creek settlement, Meigs County, Ohio. His childhood was miserable—an obscene combination of too little to eat and too much hellfire-and-damnation religion. His father, a would-be scholar and failed farmer, gave all thirteen of his children names beginning with A (Abigail, Amelia, Ann Maria, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, Adelia, and Aurelia). The name was all he gave Ambrose—that and his love of literature.

In 1925, sixteen-year-old Luigi Barzini—who has since become a celebrated journalist—arrived in America aboard the Italian ship Duilio. For middle-class Italian immigrants like Barzini, the reality of America was not the shocking ghettos of the city—the image of the new country that usually greeted the poor—but rather the cultural shock of American ways. In the vignettes on these pages, excerpted from his new book, O America: When You and I Were Young , to be published this month by Harper & Row, we are treated to some of his affectionate backward glances at various perplexities that delighted and assailed him.

The twentieth century blew into Texas one year and nine days late. On January 10, 1991, two veteran oilmen named Patillo Higgins and Anthony F. Lucas brought in a towering gusher of oil at Spindletop, a scrubby mound just outside the sleepy rice-market town of Beaumont. Until that day, the Texas economy had prospered on cotton and cattle; although pioneer oilmen had tapped a field near Corsicana in 1894, all but a trickle of America’s oil was still being produced east of the Mississippi.

Spindletop changed everything. Eighty thousand barrels poured forth each day from a single well; no one had ever seen anything like it. Within a year, wrote one dazzled geologist, Texas oil was “burning in Germany, England, Cuba, Mexico, New York, and Philadelphia.”

Nobody, it seems, is happy with the regulatory agencies. U.S. News and World Repart runs a cover story entitled “The ‘Regulators’—They Cost you $130 Billion a Year.” Consumer advocate Ralph Nader and his “Raiders” produce numerous books attacking the agencies as captives of supposedly regulated interests. To adorn a cover story on “Big Government,” Newsweek depicts a disgustingly overweight cartoon figure, recognizable only because he is wearing the star-spangled get up of the once trim Uncle Sam. And politicians of both parties promise “regulatory reform” as one of their highest priorities in streamlining the federal bureaucracy.

Dear Mrs. Post, How can I serve a formal dinner for eight without a maid?” In her almost forty years as America’s acknowledged social arbiter, this was the query most often received by Emily Post. The answer was characteristically simple and precise: You cannot serve a formal dinner without a maid. But, she would continue, you can serve a gracious, if informal, dinner. Step by step, course by course, painstaking detail by painstaking detail, she would explain the process to nervous hostesses across the country. In her famous book on etiquette, in several years of daily radio broadcasts, in her column published internationally by over two hundred newspapers, Emily Post told the English-speaking world how to handle every social situation imaginable.