January 2011

At one point in the Battle of White Plains an American militiaman whose unit was temporarily not engaged with the enemy called out to a nearby civilian: “Who’s ahead?” The civilian, holding a small square object up to one ear, replied: “Oakland, 3 to 1.”

The proper Baltimore gentry of the mid-nineteenth century who paid Hans Heinrich Bebie to paint their portraits posed for the staid, rather dour man (or so he seemed) whose own self-portrait appears to the left. The neat and competent if uninspired likenesses that rewarded their patronage gave them little indication that Bebie was anything more than a stolid professional. Many cities had their Bebies until the age of photography.

By choice, cryptographers are an unsung and anonymous lot. In war and peace they labor in their black chambers, behind barred doors, dispatching sheets of secret symbols and reading encoded messages from the innermost councils of foreign governments. Few tales have leaked from those rooms.

Yet cryptographers have at critical moments affected the tide of history, for better or for worse, far more than some of the legendary heroes known to every schoolboy. On occasion American officials have blundered badly with codes and ciphers. On other occasions American cipher experts have shown brilliant flashes of imagination that lone will live in the sparse annals of cryptography.

Yorktown was not the end of the Revolutionary War. The Americans were to gain one victory more.

In 1783 negotiations for final peace and independence for the Colonies were ended. By mid-November, 1783, there remained in New York the remnants of the British armies, some six thousand British soldiers. There were also several thousand civilians who were Loyalists and who had come to New York to be evacuated with the British fleet. The fleet was assembled in New York Harbor, and it was hoped that embarkation would be accomplished by November 23. There were delays, however, and the evacuation was finally set for Tuesday, November 25. The British were to occupy the old fort at Bowling Green until noon of that day, when an American contingent would march down the Old Post Road and into the Bowery, take final possession of the fort there, and raise the American flag—which represented a “new constellation among the nations,” as a contemporary observer put it.

Here it is April, the month of blustery weather and Paul Revere. Much fifing, much drumming, and many reminders that The British Are Coming.

The hiss of a poisonous snake warns the passer-by to keep his distance or risk a dangerous bite. Man’s hiss is far deadlier; a single one, uttered in Scotland, killed more than thirty people three years later in New York City. On March 2, 1846, the curtain of Edinburgh’s Theatre Royal rang up on Hamlet before an audience that, like all in that queenly city, was notable for its reticence. In the role of the youthful prince, William Macready labored under other handicaps as well. Only a few hours short of his fifty-third birthday, he had grizzled hair, a bony figure accentuated by habitually abrupt movements, eyebrows that shot up, and a nose that one viewer described as simply “queer.”

The nearest thing in the United States to an academic legend—equivalent to that of Scott Fitzgerald in fiction or the Barrymores in the theatre—is the legend of Thorstein Veblen. The nature of such a legend, one assumes, is that the reality is enlarged by imagination and that, eventually, the image has an existence of its own. This is so of Veblen. He was a man of great and fertile mind and a marvelously resourceful exponent of its product. His life, beginning on the frontier of the upper Middle West in 1857 and continuing, mostly at one university or another, until his death in 1929, was not without adventure of a kind. Certainly, by the standards of academic life at the time, it was nonconformist. There was ample material both in his work and in his life on which to build the legend, and the builders have not failed.