Thinking a little more deeply than Mr. Hofstadter did, you will see that an attempt at outright confiscation of weapons will affect the legitimate, law-abiding citizen first, and will probably affect him alone. Those who would use weapons for illegal purposes would secure them anyway, much as the outlawed Republican Army in Ireland has done.
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The attitude that we as a nation can cure our problems simply by passing laws is rather silly. We can make it a crime to possess a gun. But that isn’t going to stop the thief or the robber or the professional killer.
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I consider our heritage to be a proud one. Part of that pride, and part of that heritage, are guns, and the “nation with such a temperament” which used these guns, for better or for worse. The “ethnic and racial mixture” who compose this nation, and who possess these guns, are the same ones who have made this nation what it is today; proud, powerful, and obviously successful in its endeavors.
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In October, 1970, this magazine carried an article by Professor Richard Hofstadter, a distinguished American historian who, we deeply regret to report, died on October 24 after a long illness. Mr. Hofstadter’s article evoked a large number of critical letters to the editor. The subject was “America as a Gun Culture"; the author’s thesis was that for various historical reasons our society is dangerously permissive about the ownership and use of firearms, and that stricter gun-control laws are needed. There was no suggestion that all guns be confiscated, but it was urged that careful and uniform registration of firearms is essential.
Everyone wanted to be invited to 148 Charles Street, where Charles Dickens mixed the punch and taught the guests parlor games, John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe vied in telling ghost stories, and Nathaniel Hawthorne paced the bedroom floor one unhappy night in the final miserable year of his life. Willa Gather used the address as the title of an essay in her book Not Under Forty , and Henry James described, in The American Scene , the “effaced anonymous door” where he found “merciful refuge.” The address was once nearly as well known as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is today, and for much the same reason—it represented a center of power. The power was not, however, political, but cultural.
A young army officer’s wife gave this account of a visit to Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park in 1877: Each and everyone took the occasion to have their laundry cleaned, much needed after a long and soapless trip … A sight it was to behold, to see the felt hats of the men and flannels difficult to tell of what color they were, thrown into the boiling vat, where after a few forthwarning and premonitory signs of another eruption … the hats and almost entire wardrobes shot high aloft, bleached and cleaned to suit the wearer to his entire satisfaction and astonished admiration.
History is not lacking in tales of virgin birth. Few such stories have had the benefit of professional attestation, however, and a good many have given rise to skeptical jibes, especially among neighbors of the young ladies concerned. During the Civil War a remarkable case was carefully recorded for the annals of medicine by a Union doctor, Captain L. G. Capers. It involved a refined, seventeen-year-old girl who became pregnant by a young soldier whom she had never even met, much less had intimate connections with.
According to Captain Capers’ story, he was acting as a field surgeon during a skirmish near an unnamed Virginia village on May 12, 1863. About a hundred yards from the rear of his regiment was a big house, on the steps of which a matron and her two daughters stood watching, ready to act as nurses if necessary.
As bedfellows they were curiously mismatched. Yet Benjamin Franklin and John Adams once shared a bed at a crowded New Brunswick inn, which grudgingly provided them with a room to themselves hardly larger than the bed itself. The room had one small window. Adams, who has recorded the night’s adventure, remembered that the window was open. Afraid of the mild September night air, he got out of bed and shut it.
Back in 1883, when girls were still considered young ladies, the Chestnut Street Female Seminary moved to a new home—a palatial mansion outside Philadelphia that was surrounded by 180 acres of tree-studded hills. The great house, above, was popularly known as Cooke’s Castle, after its owner, Jay Cooke. He, however, called it Ogontz, after a Wyandotte chieftain he had known when growing up in Sandusky, Ohio. The mansion, which had cost him a million dollars to build, contained fifty-two ornately decorated rooms; between its two wings was a conservatory that looked out upon an Italian garden, at the end of which was a wall designed to resemble the ruin of a castle. Cooke, the so-called financier of the Civil War, moved into Ogontz in time for Christmas in 1866. Over the next seven years innumerable parties were held there, and distinguished notables, domestic and foreign, were overnight guests.