May 2020

Some of us remember dreaming, fifty years ago, of a computer small enough to fit in our home. And a telephone without wires.

On a much bigger scale, in 1970 many of us looked forward to the day when women and minorities weren't considered second class citizens. And to a time when peace and prosperity were the norm.

Today, the news brings us echoes of that time. In cities across the country citizens demonstrate against racial injustice. In distant lands courageous young Americans die after answering their country’s call to serve. And politicians seek advantage by pitting Americans against each other.

In the spring of 2016 the American Political Science Association polled forty scholars to name the worst vice president of the last century. Their consensus choice was an easy one: Spiro Agnew.

An unlikely band of American librarians and archivists mobilized during World War II in a forgotten war effort centered on books and documents. Helped by an odd assortment of scholars, spies, and soldiers, the information hunters gathered enemy publications in the spy-ridden cities of Stockholm and Lisbon, searched for records in liberated Paris and the rubble of Berlin, seized Nazi works from bookstores and schools, and unearthed millions of books hidden in German caves and mineshafts.

Improvising library techniques in wartime conditions, they contributed to Allied intelligence, safeguarded endangered collections, and restituted looted books — and built up the international holdings of leading American libraries for the postwar period.  These men — and a few women — came together in a series of enormous collecting missions that originated in the unique conditions of World War II.   

Editor's Note: Historian Larry Tye has just written a definitive biography of the controversial Red-hunting Senator, Joe McCarthy, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. We asked him to give us a preview of some of the fascinating material he found in previously inaccessible files.

Editor’s Note: We are delighted to publish another essay by Nathaniel Philbrick, author of such  outstanding books as In The Heart of the Sea and Sea of Glory. Portions of this essay appeared in Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War.

In 1967 Time Inc. was the biggest magazine publisher in the world, and highly profitable. Its founder, Henry Luce, was still alive.

Straight out of graduate school, I went to work as a researcher for Fortune Magazine, one of the most prestigious of the four magazines in the Time, Inc. empire, which included Time, Life and Sports Illustrated. Fortune had been founded shortly before the Depression as a celebration of American capitalism, energy, and enterprise by the best writers and photographers that money could buy. Among the early contributors were the poet Archibald MacLeish, the great photographer Margaret Bourke-White, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and writer James Agee, who toured the South with photographer Walker Evans for a story that became the basis for his classic book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  

Editor’s Note: In May 1970, my Yale classmate, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., and I watched National Guard soldiers roll heavy tear-gas machines across the historic New Haven Green. The compressors emitted a loud hum as they pushed clouds of stinging smoke toward a crowd protesting the trial of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. 

Radicals in the Weather Underground had threatened to set off bombs. We were terrified they would destroy Yale’s post office and phone system, which happened to be directly under my first-floor dorm room. (Later that week two bombs did detonate a half mile across campus at Yale’s Ingalls hockey rink, but no one was hurt.)