January 2011

When the administration of Warren G. Harding took office in March, 1921, one of the duties it cheerfully assumed was acting as undertaker to the Treaty of Versailles—at least as far as the United States was concerned. Although Woodrow Wilson had been one of the treaty’s godfathers, the Senate had not been disposed to ratify it or to have anything to do with its concomitant, the League of Nations.

Still, there was enough pro-League sentiment among a small group of senators and congressmen to engender discussion of whether Harding might be persuaded to work out some sort of compromise. Newspaper cartoonists, having had a field day over the League struggle, now depicted Harding valiantly striving to “find” a treaty which somehow would accomplish the impossible and appeal to all sides. Eventually this led to some wisecracks by the press about where the Versailles Treaty— the document itself—actually was. On the surface all this was treated in jest, but behind the scenes in the State Department a minor crisis developed.

What does a nation give a man who has everylflrthing? If a man happens to be the country’s first citizen, he may be rewarded with honor and fame and the respect of high office; after death, his name can be assigned to the archives of public memory. All of this happened to George Washington, who was certainly first in the hearts—though not, as it turned out, in the pocketbooks—of his countrymen.

The Challenger

Broke Hall stands four square and baulemented, dose by the river Orwell below the little village of Nacton in Suffolk. It is an unpretending house. The main gates are plain. The drive leads straight, shadowed and scented by limes either side, a long way before the plain oak front door. To the right the sun (lashes off broad reaches of the river; ahead the ground rises and folds around the square house, the old flagstones, and the lawns. Oak trees and evergreens complete its shelter from sea winds. Birds sing among them.

From the gentle high ground beneath these trees the view of the river and the far bank breathes England; there is nothing harsh, nothing swift, no feverish rapids, no sparkling pools, only the broad, easy stream leading in laxy curves to the sea. The far bank about a mile away rises alternately wooded and swelling with green and rich brown Relds, pointed up with white houses, more trees, graceful village churches, nothing to jar nature.

abaft.

Behind.

bear up.

To steer closer to the wind.

bridle port.

A bow port through which hawsers are passed in mooring.

carronade.

A type of short iron cannon of large caliber.

cr’jack.

Short for crossjack . The lower yard on the mizzenmast (see mast). Cr’jack braces is applied to all braces on the mizzen.

dispart.

A metal sight set upon the muzzle ring of a piece of ordnance which enables the gunner, in calculating the proper elevation of his weapon, to correct for the difference in the diameters of the barrel at the breech and the muzzle.

dolphin striker.

A spar extending downward from the bottom of the bowsprit cap.

fiddlehead.

Would the Articles of Confederation prove a viable instrument of government? Could the thirteen newly independent states forge an effective union? Would America enjoy a lasting peace? These were some of the questions that concerned responsible statesmen in the years following the Treaty of Paris of 1783. By reason of his central role in the administration of the nation’s foreign affairs, John Jay played a crucial, if not decisive, role in shaping the Confederation’s destiny. Perhaps no better illumination is cast on the shape and course of events in those years than is provided by the Jay Papers. Now housed in Columbia University’s Special Collections, Jay’s correspondence plots the nation’s fever chart. When a new Constitution had been adopted and a durable union forged, the fever broke.

Having sacrificed trade with the British West Indies by seceding from the empire, imaginative New !England businessmen looked to the Orient to [ill the trade gap. To that end a Bostonian named Samuel Shaw was dispatched for Canton in February, 1784, as supercargo on the Empress of China. She arrived there on August 30, and is seen above at far left in a harbor scene painted on a fan given her captain by the Chinese. On Shaw’s return he sent a report to Jay.

“We have reached an age, those of us to whom fortune has assigned a post in life’s struggle, when, beaten and smashed and biffed by the lashings of the dragon’s tail, we begin to appreciate that the old man was not such a damned fool after all. We saw our parents wrestling with that same dragon, and we thought, though we never spoke the thought aloud, ‘Why don’t he hit him on the head?’ Alas, comrades, we know now. We have hit the dragon on the head and we have seen the dragon smile.”

One should write only about what one loves.” Ernest Renan, the biographer and historian, said it in the last century; and lor this writer at least it is profoundly true, the more impressive because in Renan’s lifetime he withstood prolonged literary attacks. If so tough-fibered an author confessed that he loved his subjects, why might not the rest of us do the same? For a considerable time it was unfashionable to admire one’s biographical hero; the debunking period lasted a full generation. Lytton Strachey started it, and on the whole it was a healthy movement, a reaction against the laudatory familial biography of the nineteenth century. But Strachey was a brilliantly talented writer; his imitators and followers did not have his genius, and the art of biography suffered. We outgrew the fashion, perhaps because debunking is easy and what is too easy does not hold up. Anthony Trollope said, “There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.” But the stigma remained; a book was not true unless it was malicious.