January 2011

Last year Jim Burk, supervisor of secondary education in Montana, proposed that American history be made an elective rather than a required course in the state public schools. This, he said, would give students and guidance counselors greater flexibility.

Burke’s proposal attracted more notice than any other revision of standards suggested in recent years.

Among those who bridled at the idea was K. Ross Toole, professor of history at the University of Montana. In a letter to the “Montana Post,” the newsletter of the Montana Historical Society, he said:

While France, Germany, and England are requiring the teaching of American history, we are apparently thinking of dropping it. We are in the process of producing a whole generation of functional illiterates. … It is true that American history is very often ineptly taught in our high schools. The solution, however, is not to drop history, but to teach more of it and to teach it better.

David Driskell, an authority on black American art, has long been convinced that the celebrated wroughtiron balconies in New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina, were the work of anonymous slaves who had carried the ancient skills of West African metalworkers across the Atlantic with them.

Recently Driskell was delighted to find living proof of his thesis when he met Philip Simmons, a seventy-year-old black ironworker whose ties go back to the era when the balconies were first wrought.

At the age of eight Simmons was apprenticed to a ninety-year-old man who, in turn, had learned his trade from one of the mid-nineteenth-century slave artisans. Simmons grew up to work the old craft in the old way. At right he stands with one of his elaborate creations, the gate in front of a church on Wentworth Street in Charleston.

BICENTENNIAL OPPORTUNITIES—BIGGEST AND SMALLEST THE STATE OF MONTANA VS. AMERICAN HISTORY SLAVE ART YOU CAN FOOL SOME OF THE PEOPLE … ABRAHAM LINCOLN SAID MORETHAN 100 YEARS AGO; BERTHA NEVER LOOKED BACK

…Most of us live our threadbare lives in places where nothing much happened,” begins a press release for a Massachusetts organization called Heritage Commons Realty Trust.”… Now along comes Virginia Long Martin with an offer to sell to anyone who has the modest purchase price of $7.76 one square inch of what is about as close to a historic landmark as you can get outside of Independence Hall.”

Ms. Martin is selling a mite of ground in Lexington, hard by the road where the minutemen fired on the British during the eventful afternoon of April 19, 1775.

The purchasers get a gold-sealed, hand-lettered deed conveying beneficial interest to their new land and a parcel number identifying their particular inch. “Beneficial interest” means that the owner is not permitted to build on his plot.

F. Scott Fitzgerald surverying the ashes of the Jazz Age from the vantage point of 1931, wrote: “By 1927 a wide-spread neurosis began to be evident, faintly signalled, like a nervous beating of the feet, by the popularity of cross-word puzzles.”

Of course, at the time he was writing, the twenties were tarnished for Fitzgerald, but there is no doubt that toward the end of the decade the crossword puzzle was a ubiquitous and obsessive element of American life.

It was born inauspiciously, surrounded by ethnic jokes and doggerel about newlyweds, in the December 21, 1913, issue of Fun magazine, a Sunday supplement to the old New York World . This inaugural puzzle, with the definitions anchored by numbers at both ends, was composed by Arthur Wynne and appears at the right. Those who want to try their hand at it will find the solution on page 104.

He was an old-fashioned man by the purest definition. Forget that he was enamored of twentieth-century artifacts—the telephone, television, supersonic airplanes, spacecraft—to which he adapted with a child’s wondering glee. His values were the relics of an earlier time; he had been shaped by an America both rawer and more confident than it later would become; his generation may have been the last to believe that for every problem there existed a workable solution: that the ultimate answer, as in old-time mathematics texts, always reposed in the back of the book. He bought the prevailing American myths without closely inspecting the merchandise for rips or snares. He often said that Americans inherently were “can-do” people capable of accomplishing anything they willed; it was part of his creed that Americans were God’s chosen: why otherwise would they have become the richest, the strongest, the freest people in the history of man? His was a God, perhaps, who was a first cousin to Darwin: Lyndon B.Johnson believed in survival of the fittest, that the strong would conquer the weak, that almost always the big ’uns ate the little ’uns.

In a predictably casual way, the loosely held fraternity of the road looked after its own. One of the most engaging examples of this was the hobo custom of chalking crude symbols on barns, fence posts, and water tanks so that the boes who came after could tell at a glance what sort of reception they could expect. The samples here represent a few of the dozens of hieroglyphs that indicated to the hobo whether he was more likely to receive a sandwich or a gust of bird shot when he hit town.

In October, 1975, a carful of teenagers came cruising down a Hartford, Connecticut, street and rammed into a limousine carrying President Gerald R. Ford. Though the Chief Executive was momentarily shocked, nobody was hurt, and the incident passed away in smiles when President Ford later telephoned the hapless young driver to say that everything was all right. At that time a spokesman for the Secret Service said that the freak accident was the first of its kind.

But no man escapes history, and we know that the Presidential mishap was no more than a pale echo of something that happened in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in September of 1902. The victim them was President Theodore Roosevelt, and he was not nearly so affable about his accident as President Ford was about his.