January 2011

Readers are invited To submit their own personal “brushes with history,” for which our regular rates will be paid on publication. Unfortunately, we can not promise to correspond about or return submissions.
Toy Story Freedom Rider

ON JULY 19, 1905, REBECCA JOHNSON, WHO had already become known as the poultry queen, celebrated the birth of 1,087 chicks. Her great-granddaughter loan Combellick sent us the photograph marking this event along with the following explanation:

“Mankind divides into two classes,” The Nation magazine declared in 1868: the “natural-born lovers” and the “natural-born haters” of Benjamin Franklin. One reason for this split is that Franklin does not, despite what some commentators claim, embody the American character. Instead he embodies one aspect of it —one side of a national dichotomy that has existed since the days when he and the fierce Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards stood as contrasting cultural figures.

On one side were those who believed in an anointed elect and in salvation through God’s grace alone. They tended to have a religious fervor, a sense of social class and hierarchy, and an appreciation for exalted virtues over earthly ones. On the other side were those who, like Franklin, believed in salvation through good works, whose religion was benevolent and tolerant, and who were unabashedly striving and upwardly mobile.

“We’ve got it, but I don’t like to pour it.” The couple next to me at the bar had ordered Gray Goose vodka martinis, and the bartender didn’t want to make them. I had no idea what was going on, and neither did the couple. “It’s French,” the bartender explained. The couple nodded and settled on a vodka made by our unwavering ally Russia.

The French have gotten us sore again. As Richard Brookhiser points out in his essay in this issue, that’s no new thing. We’re always getting mad at them. Well, they can be irritating. I remember seeing a Bill Mauldin cartoon published in the mid-1960s after Charles de Gaulle had committed some bit of austere highhandedness. It shows him standing in a field of white stone crosses, shrugging (of course) and saying, “Why do you Americans stay where you’re not wanted?” That’s the French for you: No gratitude.

Beginning with a lecture in St. Louis in 1867, Mark Twain’s great career as a public speaker spanned about 40 years. But, thanks to his avatar Hal Holbrook, he has gone on amusing and instructing and scolding us for another half-century on stages all over the world. Though Holbrook has now lived longer than Twain did, he continues to portray the old man with undiminishcd vitality and even eerier authenticity in his one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight!

A recipient of five Emmys, twelve Emmy nominations, a Tony, an Obie, a Peabody, and assorted other awards, Holbrook makes his home in Beverly Hills in a house that has ever induced in me a desire to live in Los Angeles. He greeted me there on a windy afternoon last December. In my estimation, he is one of the two or three finest actors in America, and, in the field of historical portrayal, there is no one who can touch him. Though I had been inspired to interview him after recently catching his act in Nashville, my admiration has been almost lifelong.

Fifty years ago this summer, the Eisenhower administration created a unique federal agency, one that most Americans never even knew about. Its name was the United States Information Agency; the reason for its obscurity was that, by congressional fiat, it could not distribute its products and services within the United States.

The USIA’s mission was to influence foreign audiences, to make them feel more receptive to America in general, and to its foreign policies in particular. It was, in short, a propaganda effort. It operated in more than 150 countries during the Cold War years until it was closed down as an independent agency in 1999 and its surviving programs were transferred to the State Department.

Congress serves "freedom fries," American military wives talk of "freedom kisses," vandals in Bordeaux burn and deface a model of the Statue of Liberty. It’s a good time to remember that American-French relations have had many ups and downs. The ups include the Franco-American joint operation that was the Yorktown campaign; the tough-minded love letter to the United States that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America; fighting on the same side in two world wars; and cinéastes taking inspiration from John Ford. The downs include the Naval War of 1798, when French and American ships battled on the high seas; Napoleon III’s efforts to put a puppet on the throne of Mexico; Gaullist ambition and American impatience; and the current unpleasantness. The two countries hate each other as often as they love each other; the bouts of hatred are inflamed by the intervening bouts of love. If La Rochefoucauld didn’t write a maxim to describe the situation, he should have.

First, a warning: do not plan a trip to Hershey if you are counting calories. The town’s ever-present bowls of Kisses and miniatures are just too dangerous for weight watchers. The rest can start by contacting Hershey Entertainment and Resorts ( www.hersheypa.com ; 1-800-HERSHEY), which oversees Hersheypark, the Hotel Hershey, the Hershey Museum, the Hershey Theater, ZooAmerica, and Chocolate World. The Hotel Hershey provides comfortable, if pricey, accommodations, with an indoor pool, a spa, and Hershey Kisses on each pillow. Its circular dining room is worth visiting for a lavish brunch even if you stay elsewhere. An alternative famous for its smorgasbord is the Hershey Farm Restaurant and Inn, a Mennonite-owned business on 23 acres in nearby Strasburg.