January 2011

In the history of the Supreme Court, only seven men have served longer than Hugo La Fayette Black. As this is written (in January, 1968), he is in his thirty-first year on the bench. Few justices have been more consistent in their interpretations of the Constitution and, ironically, more often misread by friend and foe alike. Because he was from Alabama and had once expediently been a member of the Klan, he was called a bigot; because he was a New Dealer in the Senate, he was labelled a radical. He was and is neither. Black is a constitutional libertarian who has steadfastly and at times eloquently supported individual liberties, during a tempestuous court era that has encompassed the New Deal, World War II, McCarthyism, and, most recently, the civil rights revolution. His decisions—usually in dissent at first, and then, as the rest of the court moves in his direction, with the majority—have invariably transcended race, creed, and religion.

There is a kind of astonishing improbability about the Mount Washington Cog Railway. This New Hampshire institution is so obviously a child of the nineteenth-century world of great white summer hotels with endless porches filled by genteel rockers, that its mere survival in an age of television, expressways, and air-conditioned motels seems almost wondrous. In an age that regards 1,200-mile-an-hour supersonic aircraft as much-needed improvements upon 700-mile-an-hour jets, a transportation system that moves passengers at four miles an hour, with locomotives built in the nineteenth century, borders on fantasy. In an era that has seen family-owned businesses replaced with “multi-management corporate bodies,” to quote a recent publicity release, there is something rather quaint about a cog railway that has thrived for ninety-nine years thanks in large part to the efforts of just four men.

After the droughts and dust storms of the 1930’s, nearly half the cropland in the Great Plains was badly eroded, and seventy-five per cent of the range was in decline. Three quarters of this desolation is now under active repair, and the good work goes on. The results, throughout the Plains, recall the lines Walt Whitman wrote many years ago: “A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. /I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. …

… Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt.”

The grassy slopes in front of Boston’s State House boast no monument to Ben Butler, former governor and Civil War general, though another native son and conspicuously unsuccessful general, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, bestrides his horse in front of the east wing. Butler was not given equal statuary space because, it was felt, he was too well remembered in the flesh—and as a thorn in the flesh—to warrant a reminder in bronze.

Massachusetts memories are long: when James M. Curley stormed his way to the governor’s chair in 1934, fifty-two years after Butler, and proceeded to turn the State House and the state upside down, exasperated Republicans proclaimed him “the worst Massachusetts governor since Ben Butler.”

The Great Plains, embracing all or parts of ten states and constituting over one-tenth of the total land area of the United States, were once covered with lush grasses sprung from soil carried by rivers (above) that began with a rush high in the Rocky Mountains and ended in broad meanderings across the horizonless flatlands. In less than a hundred years of occupation by the white man, the delicate balance between the grasses and their environment was badly upset. The story of that near-disaster and of the hopeful restoration now well begun is told on the next fourteen pages. The photographs are by Steven C.Wilson; the words, for the most part, are those of men and women who down through the years have known and loved the Plains.

— The Editors

“It is almost impossible for a civilized being to realize the value to the Plains Indian of the Buffalo,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge in 1882. “It furnished him with home, food, clothing, bedding, horse equipment, almost everything.” The great beasts once covered the Plains, but despite their numbers they did not overgraze it. Dodge noted that “when the food in one locality fails, they go to another, and towards fall, when the grass of the high prairie becomes parched up by heat and drought, they gradually work their way back to the South … whence … they are ready to start … northward [again].”

“As far as the eye could reach, in every direction, there was neither tree, nor shrub, nor house, nor shed visible; so that we were rolling on as it were on the bosom of a new Atlantic, but that the sea was of rich green grass and flowers, instead of the briny and bottomless deep.” Thus James Silk Buckingham, a British traveller, described America’s Great Plains in 1837. This was the same “Atlantic of grass” that the homesteaders saw, and the longhorns when they spread over the open range up from the South—an ocean of grass to be grazed. There were homesteads to be developed, cattle empires to be expanded, and wheat fields to be plowed deep and combined. The grass grew naturally; it did not need to be cultivated. Who could imagine the broad green ocean drying up?