On December 1, in what is now Monrovia, Liberia, three dozen former American slaves desperately fought off an armed assault by a thousand native-born Africans determined to reclaim their land. The freemen had been brought to Liberia by the American Colonization Society (ACS), which hoped to solve America’s growing racial problems by moving free blacks “back” to Africa. According to a sympathetic chronicler, the society’s founders felt “that giving freedom to the slave was not enough as reparation: he should be restored to the land of his fathers and resume an existence in Africa as a Christian and an enlightened propagator of civilization.”
Most free blacks, however, saw the scheme as a way for whites to get rid of them and call it a favor. The idea that blacks could not be true Americans rankled, as did the notion that they would flock to a “homeland” from which most of them were several generations removed. James Porten, a Philadelphia freeman and Revolutionary War veteran who had built a successful sailmaking business, wrote sarcastically, “Perhaps if I should only be set on the shore of that distant land, I should recognize all I might see there, and run at once to the old hut where my forefathers lived a hundred years ago.”
Native Africans were not enthusiastic about the plan either. In 1821 ACS agents had forced a local king at gunpoint to deed them a 130-mile strip of coastland in return for a few cartloads of hardware and household goods (including place settings for twelve, complete with wineglasses). Ever since, his subjects had been waiting for a chance to expel the interlopers. When fever had killed or weakened a sufficient number, they struck.
Some of the warriors carried spears. Others bore large-caliber muskets, which they loaded with foot-long copper and iron slugs for close-range use. But the settlers had artillery, which made up for their numerical disadvantage. On November 12, after the Africans’ initial attack, the colony’s white director, Jehudi Ashmun, had written: “Eight hundred men were here pressed shoulder to shoulder in so compact a force that a child might easily walk upon their heads from one end of the mass to the other.… [They were] all exposed to a gun of great power, raised on a platform at only thirty to sixty yards’ distance. Every shot literally spent its force in a solid mass of human flesh.”
The insurgents quickly fled that debacle. Three weeks later they returned with a cleverly devised multifront attack that was better organized and more persistent than the first but no more successful. A few days after the warriors had been dispersed, a British warship, which happened to be passing by and was attracted by the sound of gunfire, brought muchneeded provisions to the weary garrison. Among the ship’s passengers was the celebrated explorer Alexander Gordon Laing, who negotiated a peace treaty.
With no military experience to guide him, the tireless Ashmun had shaken off a debilitating fever to spend months organizing the colony’s defense. He was devoutly religious, and he would use whatever means were necessary to do the Lord’s work. One historian describes a subsequent attack on a Spanish slave-trading settlement: “Ashmun landed on the beach with the armed parties of marines; the first of the towns was set on fire; the fire reached a great store or magazine of powder, and a terrific explosion occurred, filling the air with débris, thatch, splinters, and fragments of human beings.” Unfortunately for the ACS, though fortunately for Liberia’s neighbors, the energetic Ashmun died in 1828, and the society never found his equal. It limped along for three more decades until the Civil War made it irrelevant. By that time a mere fifteen thousand blacks had been resettled.
1847One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
Lincoln and Thoreau Get Pious
On January 12, 1848, Rep. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois made his first major address to the House of Representatives. His subject was the war with Mexico, which was winding to a close. Lincoln had endorsed the war as a candidate in 1846, but now he vigorously disputed President James K. Folk’s pretext for starting it, that Mexico had “shed the blood of our fellow citizens on our own soil” by attacking an American fort on the north bank of the Rio Grande in May 1846.
The territory where the skirmish took place was claimed by both countries. Therefore, Lincoln said, if the settlers in the area (who were in fact Mexicans, as everyone knew) had objected to Mexico’s rule, they could have settled the issue themselves by rebelling. “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better,” he said. “This is a most valuable,—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”
Lincoln’s remarks on the right to revolution were tangential to the main point of his speech, which was to ridicule Folk’s ill-considered rush to arms. In being so expansive, he was simply conforming to the oratorical style of the day, which favored orotund phrases and appeals to the spirit of ’76. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s words would be quoted with glee by Confederate sympathizers after he became President.
On January 26 Henry David Thoreau delivered his own thoughts on the Mexican War to an audience at the lyceum in Concord, Massachusetts. Like Lincoln, Thoreau opposed the war and cherished the right of resistance to authority. But while Lincoln gave that right to “any people”—that is, to any group acting collectively—Thoreau placed it in the hands of the individual.
This address, known today as the essay “Civil Disobedience,” grew out of Thoreau’s jailing two years earlier for refusal to pay his taxes (an irregular procedure, by the way; legally, the government should have seized and sold his property). Defending his actions, Thoreau said: “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. … When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country [i.e., Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”
Thoreau made clear that his main interest was in promoting his own selfesteem rather than freeing slaves or stopping the war: If he had paid the tax, he explained, “I should feel as if I were worth less.” He disdained practical politics (“It is not my business to be petitioning the governor or the legislature”) and wanted only “to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.”
It is unlikely that any Southern slaves, if they could have heard or read Thoreau’s words, would have been consoled by the purity of his moral perfection or impressed at his courage in spending one night in jail—certainly not as impressed as Thoreau himself was. Like many latter-day anarchists and tax rebels, he asserted that the government never did anything for him except try to take his money. Yet the slavery that Thoreau abhorred was ended by a cohesive society whose members willingly gave their dollars and sometimes their lives—not by individuals reveling in their own unsullied virtue.
1922Seventy-five Years Ago
Aimée and Coué Improve Your Life
The first week of 1923 saw two key milestones in America’s Roaring Twenties obsession with mental and spiritual matters. On January 1, in Los Angeles, Aimée Semple McPherson opened the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple, home base for her Church of the Four Square Gospel. McPherson had spent most of the previous decade as a barnstorming preacher, and her characteristically Californian mix of fundamentalist religion and mass entertainment would amount to a permanent tent revival.
Sister Aimée, as she was known, was no great beauty, and certainly not an original religious thinker. But her stage presence was riveting, her charisma was overwhelming, and she knew how to draw a crowd. Aimée (née Amy) preached almost every day, three times on Sunday. As colored lights played over her pure white gown, she spoke of love and redemption instead of sin and damnation. Vaudevillian musical acts and elaborately staged allegorical scenes rounded out her services, in addition to the usual faith healing, testifying, and (of course) collection of donations. One observer saw the proceedings as “a sensuous debauch served up in the name of religion”; another called them “supernatural whoopee.” Within five years the church had thirty thousand members.
In 1926, at the height of her fame, McPherson mysteriously disappeared for a month, almost certainly in the company of a handsome technician from her church’s radio station. Implausibly claiming to have been kidnapped, she barely escaped jailing for perjury. Then, like Henry Ward Beecher before her and Jimmy Swaggart after, McPherson took advantage of the Christian spirit of forgiveness to re-establish her career. Soon, however, more scandals and lawsuits made Aimée passé.
On January 4 a gray-haired, mildmannered, sixty-seven-year-old French pharmacist named Emile Coué arrived in New York City. Though it was his first visit to America, Coué was already wildly popular for his theories of selfhealing through “autosuggestion,” inspired by a book on hypnotism he had ordered from a publisher in Rochester, New York. The method, which consisted mainly of repeating the phrase “Every day in every way I am getting better and better” twenty times each morning and evening, was held responsible for many miraculous cures.
Coué had already taken much of Europe by storm, and one British observer worried that a visit to America would involve “lecturing in large halls to huge audiences, staring headlines in the press, innumerable interviews, and a deluge of correspondence. From such a corvée may he ever be delivered.” No such luck. As soon as Coué's ship docked, forty reporters descended on it to interview him. In between his lectures, which had been sold out for weeks, Coué taught sufferers to overcome nervous breakdown, paralysis, insomnia, and sinus trouble. As he moved on to Philadelphia, Washington, and Cleveland, crowds mobbed Coué wherever he went, desperate to touch his garments. Theologians debated Couéism’s relation to Christianity, while cocktail-party psychoanalysts interpreted autosuggestion in light of the widely discussed, if poorly understood, theories of Sigmund Freud.
After Coué returned to his clinic in Nancy, one skeptic said Americans had been “far more susceptible to his treatments than the French and English. Barnum was wise when he decided to be born in the United States.” Indeed, the episode demonstrated something Barnum was well aware of: the importance of a punchy slogan. Coué's original mantra (“Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux”) had been stiffly translated for British audiences as “Every day, in every respect, I grow better and better.” The new, improved American version, with its steady beat and internal rhyme, was just the thing for a country that would become known for its BurmaShave poetry and soft-drink jingles.
1947Fifty Years Ago
The Transistor
On December 23 researchers at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, successfully built and tested the world’s first transistor. It was an ugly-looking affair, cobbled together from irregular chunks of metal and polystyrene and gnarled wires held in place with lumps of solder. But it worked. The researchers—John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley—had proven that a sliver of semiconducting germanium, suitably mounted and connected, could amplify electrical currents just as well as a vacuum tube.
Since being invented early in the century, vacuum tubes had brought great changes to American life, making possible radio, television, and many scientific and industrial devices. Yet they had their flaws, particularly when assembled in large numbers. Like their cousin the light bulb, vacuum tubes needed a constant supply of electricity and tended to burn out after a couple thousand hours. The world’s first programmable computer, ENIAC, which had been unveiled in 1946, contained more than seventeen thousand tubes. They ate up enormous amounts of power and required vigilant monitoring and replacement, as well as efficient air conditioning. The transistor, when brought to the point of mass production, promised to be smaller, more rugged, more reliable, and much, much longer lasting than even the most advanced tubes. It would respond faster to high-frequency signals and would not need time to warm up.
The first major consumer use of transistors came in 1953, in hearing aids. Those early transistors were still no smaller than vacuum tubes, and much more expensive, but the reduced power consumption paid off the extra cost in a few months. The following year saw the earliest transistor radios, and in 1955 the first transistorized computer, the IBM 7090, went on sale. Meanwhile, researchers were learning to make transistors smaller and cheaper, eventually etching them on thin wafers of silicon. This process led to the integrated circuit, first marketed in 1962, and the microprocessor, in 1971, which have long since superseded the individual transistor for most uses.
When Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley were developing their invention, most people expected the world to be transformed by atomic energy, which had made its dramatic appearance during the recent war. Atomic energy has found a niche in naval propulsion and still generates 17 percent of America’s electricity, but its impact has fallen far short of the atomic age that early enthusiasts predicted. Instead, wartime research in electronics, which produced radar and the proximity fuze, gave us the information age—a genuine revolution that continues to reorder our lives almost every day.
1947Fifty Years Ago
The Kinsey Report
On January 5, 1948, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the American Male was published, much to the delight of voyeurs, sociologists, and joke writers. The book had impeccable scholarly credentials: Its author was an Indiana University biologist and its publisher was W. B. Saunders, a respected company specializing in medical texts. Because of the book’s expected popular appeal, Saunders had ordered twenty-five thousand copies instead of its usual two or three thousand. They instantly disappeared from the shelves, and soon two printers were working around the clock to keep up with the demand. The book came to be called simply “the Kinsey Report,” perhaps to spare the squeamish from having to pronounce the word that begins the title. And for those who actually read it, the Kinsey Report was an eye-opener, revealing that premarital and extramarital relations, homosexual intercourse, oral sex, masturbation, “petting to climax,” and a host of other practices were much more common than almost anyone would have guessed.
Reactions to the report were mostly favorable. A Gallup Poll showed that 58 percent of men and 55 percent of women thought Kinsey’s research was a “good thing,” while 10 and 14 percent respectively thought it a “bad thing.” Journalists spoke of a “chorus of praise” and “widespread public acceptance.” Kinsey himself called the response “much more favorable than we could have had any right to expect.” Of more than a thousand letters the authors received in the first month after publication, only six were unfavorable.
There were dissenters, of course. Clare Boothe Luce told a Catholic women’s group that “the Kinsey report, like all cheap thrillers, would fall into obscurity if so much attention was not paid to it.” Harold W. Dodds, president of Princeton University, dismissed the book’s “trivial graphs” and likened it to “the work of small boys writing dirty words on fences.” In a letter to the Reader’s Digest, Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers rejected the report’s implicit endorsement of promiscuity: “A man must show moral restraint to win honors in the world of sport. The athlete who fails at self-policing automatically and foolishly eliminates himself from championship company.” Many readers who paid $6.50 for the hefty tome found it tiresome to plow through 804 pages of dense academic prose in search of the good parts. Others scanned the statistics and wondered how they had missed out on all the fun.
While most of Kinsey’s fellow scientists praised the report’s honesty and importance, they tended to be more critical than lay readers. Some pointed to methodological flaws, including his all-white, all-volunteer sample group. Since the book was based on interviews, it was only as reliable as the subjects’ responses, which reticence or vanity could distort. The survey’s aggressive style of questioning, designed to overcome the interviewees’ shyness, also came under fire.
Such criticism obscures Kinsey’s most important achievement, the evidence of which is in your hands right now. By making sex the subject of serious academic study, placing his results with a major publishing house, and seeing them discussed in the mainstream press, he paved the way for a magazine like American Heritage to print the words homosexual intercourse without batting an eye. Methodological quibbles aside, Kinsey’s book was just as revolutionary as Bell Labs’ transistor, and it set in motion a revolution every bit as farreaching.
This issue’s “The Time Machine,” plus more anniversaries not included here, is available on the ‘World Wide Web at www.forbes.com/ah/timemachine.
