January 2011

Forty-odd years ago, just after the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, political circles in the United States—indeed all over the world—were shocked by the report that the fabled partnership of President Wilson and his intimate adviser, Edward M. House, had been liquidated. Ii was not the first time the story had percolated through Washington corridors into the gossip columns of newspapers; but until now these had always been dissipated in the clear light of House’s continued personal intimacy and political influence. On this occasion, however, as the winter and spring of 1920 passed, there was evident and solid ground for accepting the credibility of a break. The comradeship of the preceding eight years had lapsed. It died as abruptly as it had flowered.

By the autumn of the year 1779, Great Britain had been at war with her colonies in North America tor over four years. Things were going badly for King George III, and in particular for his navy. France and Spain were about to join his enemies: Gibraltar was threatened, and the islands of St. Vincent and Grenada were ripe for capture. But worse than this, Britain was not to be spared humiliation nearer home, at the hands of a man born thirty-two years earlier at Kirkbean, Kirkcudbrightshire, a village on Solway Firth which had been the birthplace of John Campbell, Hawke’s flag captain at the battle of Quiberon Bay.

Behind was the road, fifteen hundred miles of concrete stretching eastward to the past. Back home they had had three bitter years, each worse than the one before. All the way from the Dakotas to the Rio Grande, men said, the same wind blew, working away at the dried-out crust of the Gelds, loosening the dirt, carrying it off in whistling swirls, gathering strength until great brown clouds swooshed off with an angry roar. On Armistice Day in igg; the sky was dark as far cast as Albany, New York, and a red, poker-chip sun hung over the plains. Men and women huddled in their houses, tied handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths when they went outside, and children choked on the dust. When the wind wasn’t blowing, the dust lay like fog, sifting down endlessly, piling up on houses and fence posts, smothering what few plants survived.

As I remember, I was nine years old when my father decided that the time had come for me to “help out” in his grocery store. The year was 1910, and the place was Mansfield, Ohio. Twelve years would pass before I escaped completely from that thralldom.

In the beginning my duties were as small as I was: taking an occasional deposit to the bank and obtaining change, collecting small accounts, and delivering orders to customers who lived nearby and wanted a few groceries in a hurry. I also scrubbed the mold—it was harmless—from the hams and sides of bacon that hung in our back room, and from “Lebanon bologna,” a wonderful smoked summer sausage which we bought in barrels, it you please, from a maker in Lebanon, Pennsylvania.

Lewis Cass (1782-1866), the author of this succinct inspection report, was in 1813 a full colonel in the Regular Army of the United States and major general of Volunteers. He shared command over the 8th Military District, which included present-day Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri, and was also, during the War of 1812, in active command of the 3rd Ohio. His later brilliant career included service as Secretary of State under President Buchanan. This forthright report to a superior officer has none of the four-page (plus attachments) gobbledygook required today in the rating of government employees. It is to the point and occasionally (poor Ensign Rehanl) damningly so. It comes from old War Department files and from a period when, on America’s social scale, the Irish were very low indeed.

While the battle of control of Dartrr mouth College raged in the New Hampshire legislature and the Supreme Court, the campus itself was tense, as revealed in letters to his brother from Rufus Choate, an undergraduate at Dartmouth through those stormy years. (The quotations and connective notes below are adapted from an article prepared last year by Edward Cannery Lathem for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine .) Choate, who in 1841 would succeed the great. Webster in the Senate when Webster became Harrison’s Secretary of State, quite clearly favored the trustees and President Francis Brown of the College in their battle with John Wheelock and Acting President William Allen of Dartmouth “University.” Following their victory in the elections of March, 1816, the New Hampshire Democrats under Governor William Plumer called for legislative action on the College.

Hanover. June 16th, 1816

Japan’s emergence into the nineteenth century was as abrupt as the appearance of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry in 1853 and, to the insecure autocrats who ruled her, just as unwelcome. Perry and his squadron had come determined to open that strange and inhospitable island empire to the outside world—preferably by treaty but if necessary by force. It was the first of two visits, for he appeared again the following year, and when he had finally departed, treaty in hand, a feudal society that had remained static for centuries would never again be the same.

It would be hard to find a better concise examination of that terrible upheaval than Mr. Nichols provides. The conflict itself was brought on largely by the cultural limitations of the men on both sides—limitations “imposed by birth, environment, association and tradition.” Those limitations still exist, and all of us share in them; we are subject to them when we try to interpret and understand the enormous convulsion that took place in the i86o’s.

The point of all of which is that the development of this American Leviathan is a continuing process. The events of the 1860’s are interlocked with the events of the 1960’s; to understand one period is to understand the other. Hear Mr. Nichols: