January 2011

In recent years, as the energy crisis has developed, and bureaucracies in Washington have wrestled with little success to solve it, and Congress has moved slower than a West Virginia coal train even to agree on a battle strategy, some Americans have proposed that a public agency based in Knoxville, Tennessee, become the model for coping with the problem.

Most people who have reflected at all upon the known history of the Americas, particularly North America, have been impressed one way or another with its dominant quality of fierceness. After that early, first blush of paradisial imaginings, stained by the lush colors of the tropic islands and the defenseless peoples found thereon, a somber mood of misgiving settled over the questing Europeans, filtered their perceptions, filtered at last into the bleached bones of their accounts of exploration. This was not paradise after all, but a tangled, hostile wilderness which had to be savaged to the extent that it was itself savage.

Conductor Arturo Toscanini said of her that she had “a voice one hears once in a hundred years.” When she sang for composer Jean Sibelius at his home in Finland, he threw his arms around her, said, “My roof is too low for you,” and called for champagne. Later he dedicated a song to her. She sang at President Kennedy’s inauguration; President Johnson in 1963 presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor; and at the nation’s two-hundredth anniversary celebration in Philadelphia on July 4, 1976, she was chosen to read the Declaration of Independence in the presence of President Ford.

But for Marian Anderson, this recognition of her extraordinary talent did not come easily. Much of America in the 1920’s and 30’s did not readily open its arms to a Negro singer.

George Billings? Certainly, in Al and Ray Rockett’s long-forgotten silent epic Abraham Lincoln in 1924. The gaunt, familiar form of Lincoln has been a stock dramatic figure ever since May of 1861, when a political potboiler called Abe’s Saturday; or Washington Sixty Days Hence opened at Boston’s Mobile Theater.

No one seems to know how many times Lincoln has appeared on stage or screen over the intervening years. No one has counted how many rails he has split, or tears he has shed over Ann Rutledge; how many times he has said good-by to Springfield, or freed the slaves, or just waited, docile, for John Wilkes Booth to slip up behind him. The number must be staggering.

The leak was known of old. It can afflict either a ship or a government, it invariably means that something invisible has gone wrong, and in certain cases it ends in disaster. It is instructive to reflect on the differences between the leak as known to mariners and the leak as known to politicians, political scientists, and newspaper correspondents.

When a ship develops a leak, water that the crew tries to keep out comes in, and if the leak goes on long enough the ship goes down. The case may be ominous, but basically it is simple enough. A defect has developed somewhere in the outer skin, and in most cases it can readily be found and closed.

At fifty-eight years of age, Roscoe Conkling was still a strapping figure of a man, proud of his strength. The former senator, presidential aspirant, and kingpin of Republican politics in New York State neither smoked nor imbibed. He exercised and boxed regularly. So when William Sulzer, a young lawyer who had an office on the same floor as Conkling’s in a Wall Street building, could not find a cab, Conkling decided to leave for his club, two and a half miles away, “on my pins.”

The travails of getting to work during the blizzard were so severe that the New York Evening Sun gave front-page space to the remarkable story of a businessman who managed to make the trip from then fashionable Harlem to the City Hall area in only two hours and eleven minutes—”probably the fastest time on record for the day.” Despite the speed, the trip was not altogether without incident, as the man’s account demonstrates:

I left my house on 128th street and Sixth avenue at 9½ A.M. and at once discovered that it was snowing. I opened my umbrella, and a howling wind swept around the corner from Sixth avenue and took that umbrella out of my hand and lifted it over the roof of a neighboring flat house. Next my Derby hat flew off my head and went skimming over the snow drifts at the rate of about sixty miles an hour. I let it go, returned to my house, put on an old hunting cap, tied up my ears in a woollen muffler, and started out again to go to my business.…