January 2011

Something very strange has happened in the United States very recently. Traditional attitudes and values that have prevailed and come down from generation to generation in all but unbroken succession since the founding of the republic have suddenly been overturned or are in the process of being overturned. Traditional American ways of looking at things—including the traditional way of looking at our own past—have suddenly been reversed. A startling discontinuity, as stark as a geologic fault, has occurred in our cultural history since 1964.

It is a temptation, and one constantly yielded to by social commentators, to look upon these things (like the geologic fault) as having simply happened —as having occurred without human volition or control. The environment has changed, it is said; no wonder people and their attitudes change. The process is made to appear as inexorable as changes in the phase of the moon.

In a recent report Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel, among others, argued in support of the government’s current program limiting the amount of low-cost foreign oil allowed into this country by pointing out that “At the world market price of oil, [Alaskan] exploration and development would have been unlikely.” The statement also mentioned that “billions of barrels of oil … on offshore leases have been developed as the result of the economic incentives preserved by the [import] controls. At substantially lower oil prices this development would not have occurred.”

MINING THE PUBLIC LANDS

The Mining Act of 1866 declared “the mineral lands of the public domain … free and open to exploration and occupation,” and to this day it is perfectly legal for any citizen to seek his fortune on the public lands. Not only are “vacant” unappropriated lands at the miners’ disposal but also areas set aside for other uses, such as national forests and wildlife ranges and refuges that were carved out of lands originally part of the public domain. Even some national monuments and one national park can be mined. Congress has made mining legal in Mount McKinley National Park and Glacier Bay National Monument in Alaska, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona, and Death Valley National Monument in California. Such is the power of the mining lobby that although the Wilderness Act of 1964 created a unique system of wilderness preserves to be protected from all development (no roads, no structures), it also permitted those preserves to remain open to mineral exploitation until 1984.

As winter wore on into the spring of 1847, the hope grew in Washington that the year-old war with Mexico might be settled soon. The nation’s first major foreign conflict had been an unpopular affair from the beginning; a large number of Americans seem to have thought it would be a short skirmish, followed by a rich land-grab, and were disappointed when the Mexicans showed no immediate signs of collapsing or negotiating. When President James K. Polk learned of General Winfield Scott’s victory on March 27 at Veracruz, he concluded that the moment was auspicious for peace talks and, with the agreement of his Cabinet, looked about for a man he might send to Scott’s headquarters to be on the scene should the Mexicans decide to sue for peace.

The February issue of A MERICAN H ERITAGE announced that the American Heritage Society would divide $50,000 in “seed money” awards among twelve local, nonprofit groups that are working to save some part of America’s endangered physical heritage.

The twelve were chosen with the counsel of our two sponsors, the American Association for State and Local History and the Society of American Historians, and a number of conservation experts. While any such selection is bound to be somewhat arbitrary, we tried to spread the locales and the nature of the projects broadly.

Then we asked here for postcard votes from our Society members and other readers. And we mailed ballots to a wide cross-section of others who we believed are interested in conservation. To make sure no one really lost, we promised a minimum award of $1,000 to each group. The votes were to determine which four organizations would receive the larger awards of $25,000, $10,000, $5,000, and $2,000. A total of 114,146 voters ranked the groups in this order:

In the chill darkness of an October night in 1781 six young American seamen—unaware that the tide of war was shifting dramatically to the side of the colonists—pried the iron bars off a starboard port on a grim hulk anchored in the East River. Close by on the larboard side lay the rural shore of Brooklyn—a sparsely settled area with only the Remsen farmhouse and barn visible from the ship. In the distance off the ship’s starboard was the northernmost end of the port town of New York, occupied like Long Island by the British since the war’s beginning. One by one the sailors lowered themselves on a rope held by shipmates, dropped quietly into the dark water, and swam aft to huddle beneath the stern until the marine guard on the deck turned on his rounds and paced forward. Then they struck off for a point on the Long Island shore some two miles distant, beyond the British sentries.

When Andrew Carnegie was applying the same vigor to giving away money as he had devoted to making it, Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton University, invited him to visit the school. Wilson had grandiose plans for Princeton, and he hoped that the steel-magnate-turned-philanthropist would co-operate. But what Carnegie decided to bestow is related in this excerpt from Joseph Frailer Wall’s biography Andrew Carnegie , which will be published this fall by Oxford University Press.