January 2011

As soon as Imperial Japan destroyed the Russian Navy in a spectacular sea battle at the Straits of Tsushima in 1905, a rash of would-be Cassandras began to foretell the day when the rays of the Rising Sun would spread eastward across the Pacific, bringing Japan head-on into conflict with the United States. These early prophets of the great war to come were not cautious theorists but, rather, a wildly imaginative, zany lot—characters such as Homer Lea, a hunchback who served as a general under Sun Yat-sen and delighted in terrifying his contemporaries with sanguinary tales of Japanese bounding across the Pacific to lay waste to California, Oregon, and Washington, and men like Ernest Hugh Fitzpatrick, a walrusmustachioed poet who took time out from confecting elegant rhymes to picture the Japanese subjugating not only the United States but Mexico, too.

On Christmas morning of 1929 Fire Marshal C. G. Achstetter of Washington, D.C., commenced the tedious paperwork that follows a $135,000 fire. Reaching for his office form, “Fire Marshal’s Record of Fire,” he noted that it had been a hard month: 779 fires to date in 1929, and this most recent one was number 162 in December alone.

Address—“1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.,” he recorded. Structure—“detached brick, covered with stucco.” Occupant—“Herbert C. Hoover.” Then, “First alarm Box 157, 8:09 P.M. , 24 December; outstroke, 7:27 A.M. , 25 December.”

Only a few hours before Achstetter started work on his report, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. —the White House—had been bright with Christmas gaiety.

The Carlisle school set a pattern for education of the Indian that has endured in varying degrees down to our own day. The appalling aftereffects of the Carlisle philosophy are detailed in a 1969 report of the Special Sen- ate Subcommittee on Indian Education,∗ chaired first by Senator Robert Kennedy and, after his death, by his brother Edward. Titled Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge , the report notes:

∗ 91st Congress, 1st Session, Senate Report No. 91-501

• Indian student drop-out rates are twice the national average, nearly 100 per cent in some school districts.

• Achievement levels of Indian children are two to three years below national norms, and the Indian child falls further behind the longer he stays in school.

• Indian children, more than any other minority, believe themselves to be “below average” in intelligence, and twelfth-grade Indian students have the poorest selfconcept of any minority group tested.

On page 9 of our August, 1969, issue, in the artide entitled “Black History, or Black Mythology?” it was stated that ”… the New York Times … formed Arno Press to reprint a list of ‘Forty-Five Books America Forgot …’ ” In fact, Arno Press was already producing a wide range of reprints in the fields of art and history when the Times acquired a controlling interest in the firm in January of 1968.

House Majority Leader John McCormack [Democrat of Massachusetts] felt somewhat uneasy about the prospect of introducing the Lend-Lease Bill on the floor of the House on January 10, 1941. … The professional Irishmen who dominated his constituency were likely to become irate over any “aid-to-Britain” legislation like Lend-Lease, and having it labeled the McCormack Bill could direct their anger toward him. …

Lewis Deschler [the House parliamentarian] was aware of McCormack’s discomfiture. For no real reason that he could ever recall, it occurred to Deschler that numbering the bill H.R. 1776 might solve Mr. McCormack’s problem.… The Majority Leader was most appreciative. Not only would it end any mention of the “McCormack Bill” and thus solve his own private dilemma, but the implicit appeal to patriotism would subtly aid in building public support for the bill itself.

Although the events it describes are very recent, the document that follows seems to us the very stuff of which history is made. It is composed of excerpts from the diary kept by John Kenneth Galbraith during the Kennedy administration. A professor of economics at Harvard, an able speaker and writer, and a leading liberal with long experience in government, Professor Galbraith served Kennedy as a speech writer, adviser on economics, and Ambassador to India from 1961 until a few months before the assassination in Dallas. His six-foot-eight figure and ironic sense of humor were steady features of the New Frontier scene. While he was in India, the Ambassador frequently visited Washington and at other times wrote a series of thoughtful private letters to the President at Kennedy’s request. Some of these appear in part here.

Lake Powell commemorates Glen Canyon in much the same sense that a statue commemorates a famous man. But sculptured marble can no more give satisfaction to those who know a living man’s charms than can the lake that fills Glen Canyon replace the beauties it has submerged in the memories of those who journeyed on the river that flowed until 1963.

A monument to a person is thus an inadequate reminder to his close friends; it speaks only to the public in historical terms. It celebrates his public life; his gentler private qualities and personal attachments are not communicated. And so with Glen Canyon, Lake Powell celebrates the short history of the construction of the dam that destroyed it; of the filling of the basin behind the dam with water of the Colorado River; of the development of commercial facilities beside the lake; and of the ever-increasing crowds that come with high-speed motorboats and water skis. These are what Lake Powell memorializes. But the long, unrecorded, secret history of Glen Canyon, fragments of which survive in the minds of its few explorers, lies drowned.