March 2011

A Ride Along the Lincoln Highway tells the story of the nation’s first transcontinental highway, which, in 1913, stretched nearly 3400 miles from San Francisco’s Lincoln Park to Times Square in New York City.

Producer/director Rick Sebak of the Pittsburgh PBS station WQED, known for his films about the cultural and social history of western Pennsylvania, hosts the hour-long documentary, which includes short segments about unusual sights and colorful characters en route, interspersed with exposition on how this groundbreaking motorway ushered in the automobile age. “People often think of a cross-country trip as boring,” he says, “but if you take the two-lane road you get to see a little of everything.”

Indianapolis entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, the founder of the Indy 500 and developer of Miami Beach, conceived of the Lincoln Highway in 1912 as a means of tying together the random collection of mud tracks and meandering paths that constituted the nation’s road system. Fisher enlisted several prominent financiers, including Henry Joy of the Packard Motor Car Company, but was unable to win the support of Henry Ford.

 In late 16th-century London, a group of curious Elizabethan courtiers gathered around a sheaf of watercolors and murmured in wonder. A cheife Herowans wife of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 yeares exhibited no spectacular artistry, yet did provide something extraordinary: the first representational glimpse of the New World. Aside from a few sailors and a handful of intrepid adventurers, no Europeans had laid eyes on North America or its inhabitants, either live or in representation, and so these images were akin today to seeing people who had never been photographed before.

The painting revealed a well-proportioned Algonquian mother carrying a gourd filled with water for her family, a smile lighting up her tattooed face, as if in warm conversation with the artist. She wore several strings of pearls (much treasured in England), while her daughter showed her a doll, a red glass bead necklace, and a gold pendant, which some Englishmen had given her and were the only evidence of Europe in the scene.

Gathered around the office water cooler (actually, the automatic coffeemaker) the other day, we editors shared a bit of our fatigue with the surfeit of "reality," survivor, and celebrity-gladiator programming on television these days. Even as our soldiers fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hard to avoid images of tanned suburban faces eating fake worms in exotic locales and tackling staged contests. Fun perhaps, but somehow not ultimately satisfying, because the challenges are contrived.

 "The aeroplane seemed to tip sharply for a fraction of a second, then it started up for about ten feet; this was followed by a short, sharp dive and a crash in the field,” reported the New York Times about the crash of Orville Wright and Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge in Fort Myer, Virginia, on September 17, 1908. “Instantly, the dust arose in a yellow, choking cloud that spread a dull pall over the great white man-made bird that had dashed to its death.”

A cavalry officer ordered his men to control the crowd of some 2000, including top Army officials, who surged toward the wreckage. Rescuers pulled out the bloodied, unconscious forms of the 38-year-old Wright brother and Selfridge, a 26-year-old member of the Army Signal Corps, aeroplanist, and secretary of the Aerial Experiment Association. Three hours later, Selfridge died, giving him the dubious distinction of being the first fatality from a powered aircraft.

Wright regained consciousness and survived a broken leg, along with fractured ribs and hip bones, which left him in pain for the rest of his life.

 50 Years Ago

Davy Crockett on How to Win an Election

When the day of election approaches, visit your constituents far and wide. Treat liberally, and drink freely, in order to rise in their estimation, though you fall in your own. True, you may be called a drunken dog by some of the clean shirt and silk stocking gentry, but the real rough necks will style you a jovial fellow, their votes are certain, and frequently count double… Promise all that is asked, and more if you can think of anything. Offer to build a bridge or a church, to divide a county, create a batch of new offices, make a 

turnpike, or anything they like. 

Promises cost nothing…

—Davy Crockett quoted in “How to 

Win an Election,” August 1958

Books “That No Self-Respecting Congressman Would Read”

In his new book, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret, Seth Shulman claims that the famous inventor “was plagued by a secret: he stole the key idea behind the invention of the telephone.”

To write a great book, choose a great theme, said Herman Melville, one of the sages, fools, and common folk who appear in this vivid panorama of tragic history. So, let us now praise Drew Gilpin Faust for tackling such a theme in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War: We all die, yet, in one particularly gruesome war, men died so differently that their survivors made a new and different world. 

Before the Civil War, most people accepted death as a fact of life, but then something new happened under the American sun: mass deaths of healthy men at the hands of other men. In 1861, death became unprecedented in its numbers, unspeakable in its violence, incomprehensible in its distances from home. 

In the South, three men out of four answered the call to colors; one out of five Southern men perished. Some 360,222 men in blue died, and an estimated 258,000 in gray, twice as many of them from disease as from battle. 

Half a century after engines touched pilot to pilot at Promontory, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railroad, the imprint of the Iron Road was nearly everywhere in the American West. Some enthusiastic real-estate promoters and railway officials even claimed that the railroads invented the West—or at least the national image of the West. 

Only three miles from the White House, the house in northwest Washington, D.C, offered Abraham Lincoln a refuge from the capital’s summertime heat and political pressures. The 16th president spent an estimated one-quarter of his time in office at this 34-room, brown-and-white stucco building. Now, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has completed a $15 million restoration and refurbishment of the Lincoln Cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, and the non-profit organization offers visitors an inside look at this little-known presidential dwelling.

The house was a 45-minute horse or carriage ride for the Lincolns from the White House, but director Frank D. Milligan discourages the notion that the cottage and its grounds were the Civil War equivalent of the presidential retreat at Camp David. “This isn’t a weekend getaway,” he says. “The family lived here for five months in 1862, four months in 1863, and three and a half months in 1864,” he says. “There was something about the place, a sanctuary, that gave him the community and contact he needed.” 

THE WAR: AN INTIMATE HISTORY, 1941–1945, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, 480 pages, $50), is the companion volume to Ken Burns’ documentary series about World War II that aired in September. The War should be read by everyone in the family, from high schoolers, many of whom, as Burns points out in his introduction, “think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War,” to baby boomers, who may believe they know what their parents went through.