January 2011

At the beginning of 1917 the air in America was vibrant with a strong, unfocused, and oddly unwarlike patriotism. The war in Europe was fascinating and it closely touched American interests, but it was a long way off and it seemed like a good war to stay out of. One of the country’s most popular songs was a little number that carried its message in its title—“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” Woodrow Wilson had won re-election at least partly because “he kept us out of war.” He wrote stiff notes to the warring nations when American rights were trodden on, but he seemed unlikely to go any further than that. A musical show in 1916 drew a round of appreciative laughter with a skit showing a soldier marching along with a typewriter on his shoulder—the typewriter, it was explained, was “a Wilson machine gun.”

Then came Germany’s announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson’s April message to Congress, the declaration of war—and America was in it. Now the powerful patriotic impulse had something to focus on, and there was an abrupt reorientation of the nation’s emotions.

One hundred years ago, Alaska became part of the United States when Secretary of Slate William Henry Seward bought the vast territory from the Russians. For years the whole negotiation was labelled “Seward’s Folly,” and it was not until gold runs discovered nearby in the Yukon that Americans paid much attention to their new acquisition. The, first gold strike was made in 1896 on the Klondike, River, a tributary of the Yukon in Canada, but in rushing to get to the irresistible riches, thousands of Americans crossed and recrossed the sparsely settled territory Seward had purchased twenty-nine years earlier (see “Seward’s Wise Folly” in the December, 1960, AMERICAN HERITAGE).

Her mien was as plain and uncompromising as her treasured brass telescope, her life a long and relentless pursuit of the truth. At the age of twelve, Maria Mitchell observed an annular eclipse of the sun with her father, helping him to make and record his calculations, and for nearly six decades thereafter she was never out of touch with a telescope, nor her mind far from the heavens. She used to say it was an interest in mathematics—that and her father’s passion for astronomy—that started her sweeping the skies. But it was also the place she lived: Nantucket. On the island, people were in the habit of observing the heavens; everyone there was aware of the changes of the moon and stars, for to them the phrase “when my ship comes in” had a literal, not a figurative meaning. The majority of Nantucket men were gone, often for years at a time, to the vast, lonely waters where the sperm whale traveled; and as a consequence, it was customary for the women of the island to run businesses as well as households, to substitute for their absent men in nearly every way.

The American—or any other—heritage presupposes heirs. Heirs have a way of disagreeing on the treatment of their unearned estates. Some are whimsical enough to think they owe it to posterity to pass on at least the principal of their inheritance, as it was passed on to them. But others, eminently practical, argue that posterity’s interests (and, incidentally, their own) are best served by pursuing the fastest buck in sight. The heritage is sometimes simple and obvious, sometimes intangible, but it almost always suffers harm when the “practical” men take over.