January 2011

Sixty years ago the permanent individual income tax, with escalation built into its table of rates, came on gently and quietly, by no means ignored, yet not the object of any great furor, either.

In 1801 James Finley, a justice of the peace in Pennsylvania, connected towers on both sides of a creek with cables, hung a platform between them, and thereby invented the modern suspension bridge. It seems more than coincidence that this vital structural form had its genesis in Yankee ingenuity, for America, more than any other country, benefited from the engineering conquest of its natural barriers. During the half century after our Revolution men came to realize both how incredibly rich in resources their new-won country was and how worthless these resources were without the means to move about freely. Settlers moving west had to cross the rivers they came to only once. But for these settlers to prosper, their produce had to have sturdy and permanent access to the centers of civilization. So they built bridges. Their works carried water for the early canals and, later, the rails for the trains that were to bind a patchwork of scattered provinces into a unified nation. In Europe bridges were built to serve existing societies; in America they helped to create the society.

The hugely successful Erie Canal was considered one of the great works of its age, but today few of its handsome masonry aqueducts remain. Of these the most impressive is the Schoharie Creek Aqueduct at Fort Hunter, New York, which is shown above. Opened in 1845, it carried barges over a dangerous slack-water crossing that had long hampered traffic on the canal. It has not been properly preserved, and today only nine of its fourteen arches remain. The magnificent Starrucca Viaduct at Lanesboro, Pennsylvania, opposite, has fared much better; this 1,040-foot-long bridge, built by the Erie Railroad to carry the lightweight trains of 1851, is still in use and has no trouble supporting the weight of modern freight drags.

For two months in the summer of 1956 I lived in a tent among the Oglala Sioux of Pine Ridge Reservation, whose ancestors had tasted victory at the Little Bighorn and deep grief at Wounded Knee Creek, a few miles from where I was staying. The tent was United States Army surplus, property of my hosts, and present-day Indian militancy was then nowhere to be seen under the immense South Dakota skies. In those days the past seemed utterly dead to the Sioux. Once when I asked some tribal elders whether they planned to mark the occasion of their victory over Custer, they considered the idea a poor joke. On the other hand, the great summer holiday was the Fourth of July, when Indians from all over Pine Ridge camped together in army tents to drink and dance and hear patriotic speeches. It is one of the oddest and deepest facts about reservation life that the Sioux, descendants of nomads, like to go camping. In an aimless, bohemian sort of way they are still nomadic.

1

Common Sense is the most brilliant pamphlet written during the American Revolution, and one of the most brilliant pamphlets ever written in the English language. How it could have been produced by the bankrupt Quaker corsetmaker, the sometime teacher, preacher, and grocer, and twicedismissed excise officer who happened to catch Benjamin Franklin’s attention in England and who arrived in America only 14 months before Common Sense was published is nothing one can explain without explaining genius itself. For it is a work of genius—slapdash as it is, rambling as it is, crude as it is. It “burst from the press,” Benjamin Rush wrote, “with an effect which has rarely been produced by types and papers in any age or country.” Its effect, Franklin said, was “prodigious.” It touched some extraordinarily sensitive nerve in American political awareness in the confusing period in which it appeared.

Seventy-seven-year-old Benjamin Franklin was at the top of his form in the fall of 1783. Minister to the court of France since 1776, this revered figure from the new young country had scored widely in France. Finally, in September, 1783, he had signed the definitive treaty of peace between America and England, bringing the Revolution to its formal end. The crowned heads of Europe saluted him; the diplomats admired him; the ladies adored him.

It is of a piece with the rest of the story that the portrait of George Rogers Clark which his son described as “a Masterpiece” was painted long after the events that made him famous, when he was in the throes of his final illness, embittered and forgotten. Nor should it surprise anyone familiar with Clark’s sad tale that he should have commissioned the portrait himself or that he personally paid an itinerant painter named C. D. Cook eighty dollars for the work that required a month of sittings, since the old soldier’s face was so often contorted with pain that the artist could not continue.

Clark’s career, after all, was like the passage of a meteor —a quick, fiery moment that lit up the heavens for all to see and wonder at, only to vanish into oblivion. Yet in that brief, shining instant he revealed himself as one of the truly great captains of the Revolutionary War—never once losing a battle, saving the Old Northwest for the new nation and establishing its frontier firmly on the Mississippi River, whence all future westward expansion would be launched.

Impoundment appears to be a uniquely American practice that until recently has escaped public notice. It occurs when the President of the United States refuses to spend certain moneys appropriated by the Congress in a given fiscal year. Only eight chief executives are known to have impounded, two in the nineteenth century and, since 1941, every contemporary President from I’ranklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon.

The crowded events of this century have made it easy for us to forget what a relatively new country we are and how close to the surface our past lies. One grisly reminder came to light last April near Great Bend, Kansas, and was reported in the Kansas State Historical Society Mirror .

Spring rains had brought Walnut Creek to flood, and an astonished farmer watched the torrent expose a mass grave containing eight skeletons. The farmer called the Barton County sheriff, who determined that the skeletons were not the product of recent wrongdoing. At this point the Kansas State Historical Society tackled the mystery and came up with the story of a grim and bloody day over a century ago.