January 2011

Philippe Bunau-Varilla, one of the most extraordinary and extraordinarily effective Frenchmen who ever lived, was born in Paris on July 25, 1859, and died there on May 18, 1940, just as Hitler’s Panzer Corps was smashing across the French border. That was three months after my strange night with him, the cold, snowy night when he made his last public utterance.

I have often wondered if the strain of that night hastened his death. If so, it may have been mercy in disguise; had he lived a month longer, he would have watched Nazi troops marching under his windows in the Avenue d’lena. He would have died with a broken heart, in a resurgence of the bitterness he felt toward previous French governments—the one that failed with the Panama Canal, his young heart’s goal; and the one responsible for the false conviction of Captain Dreyfus, with whose final vindication Bunau-Varilla had much to do.

The Supreme Court’s immense prestige in modern times is often traced back to John Marshall, and his decision in the Marbury case that so broadened the Court’s role as an arbiter of national powers. Actually, its foundations were laid at least a quarter century before, in 1780, when a federal Court of Appeal was established under the Articles of Confederation to settle disputes over the disposition of ships taken as prizes. This body heard sixty-five cases before it met for the last time—in Philadelphia, in May of 1787— two days after another group of men assembled in the same city to establish a new and broader national judiciary as part of a new system of government.

Arguments still rage over the precise structure and scope the members of the Constitutional Convention intended to give to the federal court system that emerged from their secret sessions. The language of the Constitution is general:

“In some 81 instances since this Court was established, it has determined that congressional action exceeded the bounds of the Constitution.” Thus wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1958, in a decision justifying an eighty-second such instance. An eighty-third, by Warren’s count, occurred this past February, when the Supreme Court struck down legislation revoking the citizenship of Americans who stayed out of the country to avoid the draft. Among other cases in which the Court, relying upon the precedent established in Marbury v. Madison , has rejected congressional legislation have been these:

Dred Scott Case, 1857, the first nullification since Marbury, declaring the Missouri Compromise to have been invalid.

First Legal Tender Case, 1870, striking down a provision making legal tender of greenbacks printed to finance the Civil War. The Court, with two new justices, reversed itself the following year.

In 1905 a New York publisher brought out the remarkably frank memoirs of a Tammany ward boss, George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924), as recorded by his Boswell, William L. Riordon of the New York Evening Post . They have just been republished in a Button Paperback, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall , with a perceptive introduction by Arthur Mann. The following excerpts—witty, cynical, and shrewd—show how machine politics operated in the wild and woolly heyday of one of its most skillful practitioners.—The Editors

HONEST GRAFT AND DISHONEST GRAFT

In December of the year 1826 Captain William Cunningham, master of the ship Courier out of Boston, recorded with unstinting admiration a singular event in the quiet California port of San Diego where the Courier had called to trade. “There has arrived at this place,” he wrote, “Capt. Jedediah Smith with a company of hunters, from St. Louis, on the Missouri… . Does it not seem incredible that a party of fourteen men, depending entirely upon their rifles and traps for subsistence, will explore this vast continent, and call themselves happy when they can obtain the tail of a beaver to dine upon?”

For nineteen days in June of 1918, American marines and doughboys contested a fire-raked square mile of French woodland against the best Germany had to offer and, at terrible cost, prevailed. Laurence Stallings, co-author of What Price Glory? , served at Belleau Wood as a young marine officer and was himself grievously wounded in the last day of fighting there. Here Mr. Stallings tells the story of this first major encounter in which the American Expeditionary Force was involved. His account is taken from his book, The Doughboys , a history of the A.E.F. in France, due this month from Harper & Row.

For many years critical essayists upon the American businessman, and especially the more implacable assailants of the robber barons, have purred over a verdict once delivered by Charles Francis Adams, Jr., as predatory wildcats might purr over the discovery of a bed of catnip. “As I approach the end,” this elder brother of Henry Adams declared, “I am more than a little puzuled to account for the instances f have seen of business success—money-getting. It conies from a rather low instinct. Certainly, as far as my observation goes, it is rarely met in combination with the finer or more interesting traits of character. 1 have known, and known tolerably well, a good many ‘successful’ men—‘big’ financially—men famous during the last half-century; and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or in the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement.

“Come to Minnesota. We have a rich soil, a delightful climate, a charming country, plenty of timber, and, in short, woods, lakes, rivers, prairies and meadows, all intermingled in the most desirable manner possible.” Here was a land “almost equalling in richness the beauties of Eden,” with “space enough for hundreds of thousands, if not millions…” One acre, the writer claimed, “is worth for productiveness at least three of New England, while for the labour of working it, there is no comparison whatever, because there are no granite rocks to be blasted or dug up.” Lime and sandstone, he pointed out, “is below the surface, just where it ought to be.”