January 2011

The catch in all of this is that the lid was coming off Pandora’s box anyway. At the close of the nineteenth century the United States and the world at large were changing in such a way that America was going to be involved in power politics no matter what it did in the Caribbean or in Asia. From Dewey’s victory in Manila Bay to the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947—which can be taken as the more or less formal beginning of the Cold War—was just a half century, and that half century had seen a profound shift in the whole international power structure. When President Truman pledged this country to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” he was taking a step that was logically connected with what the McKinley administration did in 1898, but it was a step that almost certainly would have been forced upon us even if the McKinley administration had behaved differently.

Her name had been Mary Draper when, in 1748, she first entered the New River valley. She came with her widowed mother and her brother, John, together with Thomas Ingles, his three sons, and a handful of pioneers enticed by the Loyal Land Company.

The Cincinnati can boast a long list of prominent men among its hereditary and honorary members, and the range of their pursuits is as impressive as the men themselves. Washington and Monroe were original members; other Presidents to join were Jackson, Taylor, Pierce, Buchanan, Grant, Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, both Roosevelts, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Hoover, and Truman. A sampling of current hereditary members includes former Cabinet members C. Douglas Dillon and Sinclair Weeks; United States Senators Claiborne Pell, Hugh Scott, Thruston Morton, Richard Russell, and Samuel Ervin; drama critic and lecturer John Mason Brown; and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., president of the University of Virginia. Among the present honorary members are Gustavus VI, King of Sweden; James F. Byrnes, former Secretary of State and former Supreme Court justice; J. Edgar Hoover; Generals Omar Bradley, Mark Clark, and Matthew Ridgway; historian Samuel Eliot Morison; and the Right Reverend Henry Knox Sherrill, former bishop of Massachusetts and retired presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States.

In August, 1935, Ernest Hemingway completed the first draft of a story about a writer who died of gangrene on a hunting trip in what was then Tanganyika. The nonfiction “novel,” Green Hills of Africa , was already in press and due for publication in October. But the book had not used up all the material which Hemingway had accumulated in the course of his shooting safari of January and February, 1934. The new story was an attempt to present some more of what he knew, or could imagine, in fictional form. As was his custom, he put the handwritten sheets away in his desk to settle and objectify. Eight months later, on a fishing trip to Cuba, he re-examined his first draft, modified it somewhat, got it typed, and gave the typescript one final working over. Then he mailed it to Arnold Gingrich for publication in Esquire magazine in August, 1936, exactly a year after its inception. Although he had sweated mightily over the title, as he commonly did with all his titles, his ultimate choice displayed the true romantic luminosity. It was called “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”