January 2011

In little more than seven weeks the Rough Rider would be leaving the White House. Nine months prior to his fifty-first birthday a still contagiously energetic Theodore Roosevelt was ready to demonstrate that his recent order setting physical standards for military promotion was not unreasonable. He believed that it was not too demanding to require Army and Navy officers either to walk fifty miles or to ride a hundred miles in three consecutive days.

So strong and so widespread had been the protests that the prescribed ride was a hardship upon the officers that the President was determined to find out for himself. Almost no one knew of the President’s plan other than the White House physician, Admiral Presley M. Rixey, a Virginian who was Surgeon General of the Navy. Dr. Rixey did all he could to dissuade the President from what he feared would involve unnecessary risks. But even an appeal to Mrs. Roosevelt was useless, for she knew it would not do any good whatever for her to intervene.

On Sunday, December 8, 1872, the manager of the Theatre Comique on Broadway took the unusual step of buying up almost the entire front page of the New York Herald to puff the triumph of his latest presentation. It was called Africa or Livingstone and Stanley , and, to judge from the ecstatic reviews that were quoted, the show was a ringing success. The popular comedy team of Harrigan and Hart had been lured away from their previous engagement at a rival theatre in order to play the leads, and as the Comique was making an all-out attempt to broaden its audience appeal, the Herald ’s lady readers were particularly assured that the theatre and its program offered an enjoyable evening that no well-bred lady need shun.

The dignified portrait, opposite, of Bear’s Belly, an Arikara Indian warrior of the eastern plains, wrapped in a bearskin, the symbol of his personal medicine—and the photographs of the other native Americans on the following pages—are a sampling of a wondrous, but almost unknown, publishing project that took one dedicated photographer-author, Edward S. Curds—sometimes directing a staff of up to sixty assistants—thirty years to complete and that the spellbound New York Herald called in 1907, when Curds’ first illustrated volumes began to appear, “the most gigantic in the making of books since the King James edition of the Bible. …”

In the early years of this century, when an American scholar, James Schouler, could still define history as the record of “consecutive public events,” it would have been inconceivable for the American contribution to the world’s varieties of distilled spirits to be considered a proper subject of academic inquiry. But if one accepts the view prevailing among scholars today—that history includes the whole life of a people—then the manners and customs associated with bourbon (pronounced “ber-bun” in Kentucky, as in “urban”) deserve a special chapter in our social chronicles.

Among the visitors who tour Alaskan Way, the noisy street that arcs the Seattle waterfront, a few may wonder how to get to Alaska from there. Ships from Wrangell, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway used to berth there, but their last passengers crossed the gangway in 1954. Until then Seattle harbor was the jumping-off place for the North, steamships heading up through the Inside Passage and schooners coming down with yellow deckloads of spruce and hemlock. Now the takeoff is from the Seattle-Tacoma airport, where jets roar up into the rain. They touch down at Juneau three hours later, with breakfast on the way. A half century ago it was a week’s voyage to Alaska, and the lumber schooners took four times that long.

We tend to think of the turn of the century as a sentimental era when grown men were not ashamed to weep over musichall effusions about motherhood and infant mortality. If ever there was an age that should have paid proper respect to St. Valentine’s Day, it was this one. Therefore there is something faintly shocking about the perverse sideline on the following pages. They are valentines, they cost only a penny each, and they made many people unhappy once a year for more than a century. Comic valentines appeared in America as early as the 1820’s, and by 1840 they were being produced on a large scale. The dubious art form reached its peak in the late nineties and early 1900’s with the crude, vigorous examples shown here. The sketches attacked such vanished enemies of society as the stingy boarding-house keeper, as well as some that are still with us—the crooked policeman and the foul-mouthed teamster, for instance.

Every man, we are told, craves some distinction, and we have ours, a plain, simple, and unfortunately secure one. We come horn the least beautiful town in New England—New London, Connecticut, known to sportswriters as the Whaling City but to those who operate on less historical principles as Eyesore-on-Sea. Our citizens have been celebrated in the past as smugglers, as embezzlers, as book burners; oui town as a nest of privateers, a rendezvous lor rumrunners, a Navy “liberty” port, and the watering place of the hard-drinking family of the late Eugene O’Neill. Several of his plays deal with our declining fortunes. Now we are in the papers again, because our city fathers are about to tear down our railroad station, a registered national landmark designed in 1885 by one of the great American architects, H. H. Richardson.

On any list of events that have altered the course of history the opening of Japan to foreign trade in 1854 must surely rank high. While the United States was pushing its boundaries westward to the Pacific and reaching the early stages of industrialization, Japan lay cradled in the tight shell of its own seventeenth century. Under an absolute ban on intercourse with the rest of the world imposed in 1638, Japanese citizens could not leave the islands, and foreigners could not enter them. No seagoing vessels were built, and Japanese fishermen shipwrecked on foreign shores were not allowed to return. The only contact permitted with the outside world was a very limited trade with certain Chinese, Korean, and Dutch merchants.

For the United States, Japan’s impervious isolation was a problem and a challenge. Steam vessels could be used in the China trade only if coaling stations could be found; American whalers who wandered into Japanese coastal waters needed protection and provisioning. Establishing relations with Japan was becoming imperative by 1850.

The veto is without question the most powerful single weapon available to the President under the Constitution. It places him squarely in the center of the lawmaking process, on an equal footing with Congress, and by its very existence guarantees that the separation of powers at the heart oj American government will not, in Hamilton’s phrase, be based on “mere parchment… boundaries.” All things considered, it is a remarkable power for an executive to wield in a republican state.