January 2011

The Scottsburo Case—an infamous series of litigations which was to inflame both the North and the South for many years—began inconspicuously on March 25, 1931, as white and Negro hobos brawled aboard a freight train moving across northeastern Alabama. One of the white youths thrown from the tram reported the fight to the nearest statwnmaster, and a Jackson (bounty posse stopped the tram at the rural village of Paint Rock. When deputies removed the nine Negro teenagers on board they also discovered two young white pirls, aged seventeen and twenty-one, who were hitching a ride from Chattanooga, Tennessee, back to their home in Huntsville, Alabama. In the first confusing minutes after the arrests, Ruby Bates whispered to officials that she and her friend, Victoria Price, had been raped by the nine Negroes, who ranged m age from twelve to nineteen. A hasty medical examination revealed evidence of sexual intercourse.

Can it be recaptured? I wondered as the Verdun train rocked south through the, darkened farmlands of Champagne. Can another generation really grasp this old lost thing that you have held and heard in imagination and in long night talks? Have another drink. The whiz-bangs were the worst . … The solid men with the beefy, cheerful faces, those big hands like stones on the red Formica table top. I remember the first time I went into the lines . … Can it be recaptured, that already ancient time, shadowed by the racing madness of another war, those days and nights you heard about so often?

The Argonne. …

In an article entitled “Cioudbuster” for a 1943 issue of WNYF , the magazine of the New York Fire Department, Peter J. Malier reflected that “when almost everything else was coming apart and tumbling earthward with the stock market … the Empire State, with its gracefully curved mast 1,250 feet in the sky, became a reality.” Two years later Fire Commissioner Patrick Walsh cited Maher’s words in his annual report. Walsh looked back over the bleak years of the Depression and recalled the wonder and the paradox of the period from 1929 to early 1931: while the Western world was slipping deeper and deeper into economic stagnation, the Empire State Building was rising higher than any Other structure in the world.

When the Erie Canal was built in the 1820’s, it was the engineering marvel of its time. And, considering the tools and technology of the period, it still appears a rather respectable undertaking. Extending for 363 miles, stepping up hill and down valley a total of nearly seven hundred vertical feet by eighty-four lift locks, soaring across rivers on arched aqueducts, sometimes grooved into the side of a hill or straddling the backbone of a convenient ridge, it overcame formidable obstacles to connect the Hudson River with Lake Erie, and so provide the first practical link between East and West.

In war the important thing, noted Winston Churchill, is resolution; and it is equally true that the lack of it can be disastrous. We have seen both sides of this homely truth displayed in modern times, one way in World War II, another at the Bay of Pigs. As this goes to the printer, America has not yet made up its mind about another case, in Vietnam. Once upon a time, over a century ago, it faced the same issue, in the late, agonising stages of the Civil War. What happened then is described most penetratingly in this abridgement of portions from Grant Takes Command , by Bruce Cation, which will be. published early next year by Little, Brown and Company.—The Editors

There has been much talk, during the current presidential campaign, about “the new politics.” This phenomenon depends largely on the candidates’ voluble entry into your living room by way of the TV set, larger than life and, they hope, twice as natural. Few of the people who voted for or against Abe Lincoln ever got close enough to him to see what he really looked like in action, whereas in this election, if the Republican candidate doesn’t shave closely enough, or the Democratic candidate develops a nervous facial tic, everyone knows about it.

This electronic intimacy, the theory goes, has brought a new quality into presidential politics. Looks and personality may count more than reputation or, for that matter, actual executive ability. For the first time in history a man’s political future may hinge on the same things that make a soap commercial a success or failure—as if, you might say, there were a Tide in the affairs of men.

Editor's Note: Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker was Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces in 1944; consequently the mission against the abbey of Monte Cassino was carried out by his bombers. One of America’s most distinguished airmen, General Eaker was chief pilot of the famous Army Air Force plane Question Mark, which in 1929 set an endurance record of over six days and nights; in 1936 he made the first transcontinental “blind” flight, using instruments only. Soon after America’s entry into World War II he became commander of the Eighth Air Force, in England; from 1945 until his retirement in 1947, he was Deputy Chief of Staff of the United States Army Air Forces. Co-author with General Henry H. Arnold of several books on air power, he currently writes a syndicated newspaper column on aviation and military matters.

A little less than three quarters of a century ago America had a presidential election marked by a passionate argument over American involvement in Asia. As a result of the “splendid little war” with Spain, the country found that it possessed an empire in the Far East; found also that it was deeply involved in the international politics of the Orient, was fighting to suppress a guerrilla war waged by men of a different color,∗ and altogether was following a course that seemed to have very little in common with American traditions, American ideals, or the precepts of the Founding Fathers.

∗ One aspect of that war is described in “Pershing’s Island War,” beginning on page 32 of this issue.

It was perplexing and disturbing, and a number of prominent Americans correctly believed that it would have long-range consequences that some subsequent generation would find extremely difficult. As members of the subsequent generation most painfully involved in these consequences, we today can perhaps learn something by examining the anti-imperialist campaign that accompanied the election of 1900.