January 2011

In January, 1917, outside a New York courtroom, the crowd behaved predictably: the same whispers and sly grins, the same ugly innuendoes and unreasoning anger, greeted her whenever she appeared in public ; alone, facing them down, was the little woman with the shy smile and dark, penetrating eyes, quietly determined to speak her mind and persuade those who opposed her of the sanity of her cause. A few months earlier Margaret Sanger had opened the first American birth-control clinic; as a result she had been arrested several times, and now she was charged with violating a state law that prohibited distribution of literature on contraception. The judge promised leniency if she would agree to abide by the law in the future, but Margaret Sanger was determined to test the statute. “I cannot promise to obey a law I do not respect,” she said, and was sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse, where she occupied her time by giving her fellow prisoners lectures on birth control.

One day in 1921 a researcher rummaging through the archives of the Service Hydrographique de la Marine in Paris chanced upon a surprising document. What it was doing there and who wrote it have never been explained, but the paper turned out to be the only eyewitness account known to history of one of the high moments of the American Revolution. And it shockingly alters the picture America has always cherished ofthat great moment.

The document was a diary written in English by a Frenchman who had been visiting the American colonies. He may have been an agent of his government, but neither his name nor his mission is now known. The validity of the document itself, however, is not in doubt. It is full of detailed and intelligent comment on the geography, accommodations, customs, and people of the country its author passed through, and it is written objectively and without bias. The writer had no idea that he was damaging an American tradition at its birth.

It seemed, as the year 1903 drew to a close, that man was not quite ready to fly. Many had tried, but so far all had failed to get off the ground in a powered machine that could do more than just return to earth right away. Twice that very year, on October 7 and again on December 8, Charles M. Manly had taken off in self-propelled, gasoline-powered flying machines designed and built by the distinguished head of the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Samuel Pierpont Langley. Twice Manly had crashed into the Potomac River; twice he had narrowly escaped drowning before managing to free himself from the wreckage. After the second failure thé New York Times urged Langley to give the whole idea up as a waste of time. “Life is short,” the newspaper said, “and his is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly.”

When Marian Hooper Adams took her fatal dose of potassium cyanide on December 6, 1885, she almost smashed the life out of her husband as well. Suicide makes a clean sweep of the past and present; worst of all, it repudiates love. Until that day Henry Adams might have reasonably considered that his life was successful. He had not, to be sure, been President of the United States, like his grandfather and great-grandfather, or minister to England, like his father, but he had been a brilliant and popular teacher of medieval history at Harvard, a successful editor of the North American Review , a noted biographer and essayist, and he was in process of completing his twelve-volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, which even such a self-deprecator as he himself must have suspected would one day be a classic. But above all this, far above, he had believed that he and his wife were happy.

An anthropologist studying the reading habits of Americans at the turn of the late, unlamented decade would find some revealing contrasts. On the one hand he would note the smashing success of Portnoy’s Complaint —with more than 600,000 hardcover copies sold as of the end of 1969—and dozens of other fast-selling titillations. On the other, quite opposite, hand he would find that Americans by the hundreds of thousands were also reading nostalgia—volume after volume of unabashed, hard-core nostalgia.

Of course books that appeal to our affectionate memories have always been around, but the rush of them, and the numbers sold, have been quite phenomenal in the last year or two.

In the fall of 1846 a short man with a great reddish-brown beard walked into the phrenology parlor of Fowler and Wells at 131 Nassau Street, New York City, to purchase a phrenological examination. He was barely five feet three and of slight build, but his full auburn beard, his curiously bulging forehead, and his intense, deeply set dark eyes gave him a vividness and dramatic presence that compensated, along with his black stovepipe hat, for his short stature. After the report of the examination was written by Samuel R. Wells, the short man read it with satisfaction and left.

Othmel Charles Marsh lived a strenuous life full of achievement. He helped found the Peabody Museum of Natural History and the United States Geological Survey. He exposed the Indian Ring in the Grant administration and forced the resignation of a Cabinet officer, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano. He served as president of the National Academy of Sciences for three consecutive terms. His friends included Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and the Sioux Nation. His enemies—notably his bitter scientific rival, an unpacific Quaker named Edward Drinker Cope—were at least as interesting. Marsh spent his entire personal fortune to maintain an army of bone .diggers in the field, who eventually shipped to the Peabody, from all over the West, a staggering lifetime haul of thirty freight-car loads of fossils that helped establish Marsh’s reputation as a vertebrate paleontologist.

The scene was London’s Savoy Theatre on the evening of October 7, 1893, opening night of a new Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Utopia, Limited . On stage Nekaya and Kalyba, “very modest and demure” twin girls, were singing a duet:

For English girls are good as gold, Extremely modest (so we’re told)… To diagnose Our modest pose The Kodaks do their best: If evidence you would possess Of what is maiden bashfulness, You only need a button press— And we do all the rest.

Professor John A. Garraty of Columbia University is the author of a collection of interviews with eminent American scholars, Interpreting American History: Conversations with Historians , just published by Macmillan. To give an added dimension to this absorbing series of discussions, he arranged an interview with a distinguished literary critic, Alfred Kazin. In addition to several works of criticism, including his influential On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942), Mr. Kazin has edited the works of such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser; he also is the author of two autobiographical volumes, A Walker in the City (1951) and Starting Out in the Thirties (1965). The following interview has been slightly abridged.—The Editors