|
TIME MACHINE
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ
|
1949 Fifty Years Ago
The Red Scare
On January 21, 1950, a federal jury convicted Alger Hiss, a former high-ranking State Department employee, of perjury. In 1948, in testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hiss had denied being a Communist and having more than a casual acquaintance with Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Communist who had accused him of being a Soviet agent. When Hiss initially appeared before the committee, his firm denial and relaxed demeanor seemed to carry the day. Many observers thought his accusers’ case had fallen flat. But one committee member, a freshman from California named Richard Nixon, was determined to prove Chambers right. Under questioning from Nixon, Chambers gave intimate details of Hiss’s personal life and habits. Later he produced copies of classified documents that Hiss had given him.
In an era when Americans considered perjury to be a serious crime, the conviction created an uproar. Most alarming was its demonstration that spying had taken place at the highest levels of American foreign policy. (Hiss could not be prosecuted for espionage because the statute of limitations had run out.) Hiss served three years and eight months in prison and devoted the rest of his life to clearing his name, filing appeals for a new trial into the 1980s in the face of mounting evidence against him. His steadfastness made him a hero to opponents of the antiCommunist frenzy of the 1950s.
Even before Hiss’s conviction, a reaction against anti-Communism had begun among the nation’s liberals. In November 1949 a former Air Force officer named George Racey Jordan approached Life magazine with a wild and frightening story. He had evidence purporting to show that during World War II Soviet agents had flown thousands of stolen documents to Russia from an air base in Great Falls, Montana. Furthermore, America had openly sent the Soviets large amounts of materials useful in building nuclear reactors.
Life found Jordan’s tale incredible and sent him away. When the commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr., broke the story on his radio show in December, Life departed from its usual fare about cats climbing fences and the travails of pretty young models to call Lewis’s airing of the charges “a disgraceful abuse of the news.” Response from readers was mixed, but fellow journalists applauded Life’s courage. Alfred A. Knopf, of publishing fame, renewed his subscription in support; a Texas newspaperman said that Life had “rendered a service . . . to the American people” when it “put the finger on these hysteria peddlers.” Unfortunately, later evidence proved Jordan’s charges correct: The Soviets had indeed been given large amounts of nuclear materials and had stolen documents by the planeload.
Hiss’s conviction marked the high point of the postwar anti-Communist effort. In the previous few years numerous spies in government had been unmasked, along with the extensive networks they were parts of. The nation’s labor unions had also managed to extirpate most of the Communists from their midst. With some exceptions, such as the overblown inquiry into Communism in Hollywood, the investigations of Communist influence had been as fair and reasonable as the times permitted. Then, within a ten-day period beginning on the last day of January 1950, everything went crazy.
First President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States would proceed with plans to build a hydrogen bomb, raising the stakes in the arms race a hundredfold. Next Klaus Fuchs, a former member of the Manhattan Project who had helped build America’s atomic bombs during World War II, was arrested for passing information to the Soviets. Little more than a week after that, a little-known senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of scores of Communists in the State Department. Over the next few years, as nuclear tensions ratcheted ever upward and McCarthyism ran rampant, rumors increasingly took the place of evidence, and suspicion became as devastating as proof. The ensuing mess ruined the good name not only of many innocent Americans but also of the principle of anti-Communism itself.
|
|
1899 One Hundred Years Ago
When Does a Century Start?
As the year 1899 came to an end, an issue of monumental importance monopolized the attention of Americans. It had nothing to do with the Boer War, the presidential aspirations of Admiral Dewey, the currency question, or the ultimate status of the nation’s far-flung new colonies. No, the inescapable topic in barbershops, drawing rooms, and newspaper letter columns across the country was something far more troubling and momentous: When would the twentieth century begin?
Informed opinion was heavily in favor of January 1, 1901. A poll of fourteen college presidents yielded only two who argued for 1900: Caroline Hazard of Wellesley and L. Clark Seelye of Smith, both of whom ran women’s colleges and thus presumably were accustomed to unconventional thinking. The crux of the dispute lay in the choice of when to start counting. The 1901 camp took it as axiomatic that the enumeration had to start at the beginning of A.D. 1. the 1900 camp, noting that our current calendar was not established until many centuries after the unknown birthdate of Christ, believed that the starting point could go wherever anyone felt like putting it.
The New York Times, dogmatic as always, claimed that “facts and reason, the authority of all dictionaries, and the support of every chronologer and historian that ever lived, to say nothing of the invariable understanding and custom of all lands and ages” underlay its choice of 1901. It spoke dismissively of “the delusion that there is a controversy as to when the twentieth century begins,” even as the controversy dragged on in its pages for a year and a half. The Atlanta Constitution was also firm for 1901, refusing to call ninety-nine years a century even though it endorsed the free-silver scheme of calling sixty cents a dollar. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, while endorsing 1901, suggested deciding the issue in true American fashion by holding a referendum.
The question inspired discussion in Europe as well. Camille Flammarion, the famous French astronomer, was a firm believer in 1901, as was the Times of London. In Germany, however, Kaiser Wilhelm’s imperial council decreed that the new century would start on January 1, 1900. “Now let it decree that black is white,” responded one American newspaper; another called the kaiser “the only man of any prominence who cannot count up to one hundred.” As things turned out, the kaiser’s chronological slip-up was one of the lesser mistakes that Germany would make in the twentieth century.
Pope Leo XIII briefly confused matters with a proclamation that declared 1900 a jubilee year. An ambiguously worded English version (“the year 1900 . . . it is to be devoutly hoped will usher in a far more happy century”) seemed to suggest that the Pope was a member of the 1900 camp. Since the Catholic Church had invented the Gregorian calendar, his opinion carried considerable weight. Much theological disquisition ensued, but a close examination of the Pope’s original Latin text (which the ever-stuffy New York Times printed without translation, after which it commented, “That is clear, accurate, and explicit”) showed that he was actually calling 1900 the final year of the nineteenth century.
Searching for the always useful historical perspective, some journalists looked back to the turn of the previous century. On January 1, 1801, the Connecticut Courant had mocked those who put the century’s close a year earlier by saying: “Go on, ye scientific sages, / Collect your light a few more ages, / Perhaps as swells the vast amount, / A century hence you’ll learn to count.” In the same day’s Boston Columbian Centinel, a reader commented on “the daily altercation known as the Century Dispute” by predicting that “if we could be indulged with a peep upon earth a hundred years hence we should find our children as warmly engaged untying this knotty point as ever we have been.” The Bostonian’s prediction has since been borne out twice over, and it is safe to say that a century from now people will still be rehashing the same tired arguments —and looking back at old newspapers to see how it was handled the last time.
|
|
1799 Two Hundred Years Ago
The Death of Washington
On the morning of December 12, George Washington mounted his horse as usual and rode out to inspect his Mount Vernon plantation. The weather was cold and wet, and the sixty-seven-year-old former President received a thorough chill during his five-hour tour. The next day, Friday the thirteenth, snow and a sore throat kept him indoors for most of the day. When his secretary, Tobias Lear, suggested taking some medicine for his cold, the hero of Valley Forge scoffed. As the night wore on, however, Washington’s throat condition became serious. He tried to dose himself with a mixture of vinegar, molasses, and butter but could not get it down. Shortly before dawn he called for George Rawlins, an overseer who sometimes treated Washington’s livestock and slaves. Rawlins drew about three-quarters of a pint of blood.
Further help was summoned in the morning. The first doctor to arrive was James Craik, a close friend of Washington since their service together on the Pennsylvania frontier in the 1750s. According to his own account, Craik tried “two copious bleedings,” a cantharides blister, two doses of calomel, and an unspecified “injection,” which “operated on the lower intestines.” The patient, who was probably suffering from tonsillitis or diphtheria, continued to breathe with great difficulty. He tried to gargle with vinegar and sage tea but abandoned the effort after nearly choking.
Two more physicians arrived that afternoon, and in true eighteenth-century fashion, the trio of doctors proved three times as lethal as a single one. They bled Washington yet again, this time removing a full quart. Vinegar, the all-purpose remedy, was inhaled in a vapor mixed with steam. Additional calomel and “repeated doses of emetic tartar” produced nothing more promising than “a copious discharge from the bowels.” With the patient’s life slipping away, the desperate physicians applied another set of blisters as well as a “cataplasm” made of bran and the inevitable vinegar to his throat.
At this point the wheezing former President, who (as Craik wrote) had been “submitting to the several exertions made for his recovery rather as a duty, than from any expectation of their efficacy. . . . succeeded in expressing a desire that he might be permitted to die without interruption.” The old general spent his final hours putting his affairs in order and doing his best to reassure those around him. Around ten o’clock on the evening of December 14, he gave Lear instructions for his burial. When Lear, unable to speak, nodded in reply, Washington asked, “Do you understand me?” Lear said yes, and Washington spoke his final words: “Tis well.” He died about an hour before midnight.
Even in death Washington was not safe from the strenuous but ineffective medical science of his day. The architect and inventor William Thornton rushed to Mount Vernon and proposed to revive Washington by rubbing his skin, blowing air into his lungs, and transfusing him with lamb’s blood. Friends of the deceased President barred Thornton from carrying out his experiment.
From the halls of Congress to the smallest frontier village, Americans universally mourned their departed leader, though in ways that varied with their political views. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, a strong supporter of Washington’s Federalist party, compared the departed President to a lighthouse, the polestar, the Milky Way, the Ohio and Potomac Rivers, and assorted ancient Greeks and Romans. The Senate’s official memorial said, “Favored of heaven, he departed without exhibiting the weakness of humanity.” A New England minister expressed wonder “that his great and immortal soul should be contented to reside in a human form so long.”
The First Lady, Abigail Adams, decried this “mad rant of bombast” and declared, “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.” Philip Freneau, an anti-Federalist poet, reacted to the rash of fulsome encomiums by praising a different Washington: “He was no god, ye flattering knaves, / He own’d no world, he ruled no waves; / But—and exalt it, if you can, / He was the upright, Honest Man.”
The best-known summation of Washington’s career came in a resolution written by Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee of Virginia and adopted by the House of Representatives. Lee’s resolution climaxed with the memorable line “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” A few days after those words were spoken, Congress approved a joint resolution to erect a memorial to the late President—a project that would not be completed until the unveiling of the Washington Monument in 1884.
|
|
1774 Two Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Rebellion in New Hampshire
On December 13 Paul Revere rode into Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with distressing news from Boston that required immediate action. On orders from Gen. Thomas Gage, warships would soon arrive in Piscataqua Harbor to keep Fort William and Mary, in the town of Newcastle, from falling into rebel hands. Boston’s Sons of Liberty had learned of Gage’s plans the day before and had sent Revere, their most reliable courier, to alert the local patriots. Not quite a year earlier he had been chosen to bring word of the Boston Tea Party to New York City, and in September he had carried the Suffolk Resolves to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
After riding sixty miles through snow, ice, and mud, Revere arrived in Portsmouth and gave the news to a member of the local Revolutionary committee. It spread quickly. John Wentworth, the governor of New Hampshire, heard the rumblings and warned Capt. John Cochran, commander of the fort, to be alert. With only five men under his command, however, alertness would not be good for much.
Early in the afternoon of December 14, the streets of Portsmouth resounded to the beating of a drum. Some four hundred men heeded the summons and assembled in the center of town. Since the Revolution was still a clandestine affair, their identities were never definitively recorded, but tradition numbers John Langdon, Thomas Pickering, and Andrew McClary among the leaders. Ignoring an order to disperse, they marched to the fort and demanded its surrender. Cochran vowed to “defend it to the last Extremity.” His beleaguered little garrison was augmented by Elijah Locke, a tradesman who had chosen a bad time to visit the fort and had been unwillingly drafted into its defense. Sarah Cochran, the captain’s wife, also grabbed a bayonet and did what she could to protect her husband.
The motley defensive force fired three cannon and unleashed a musket volley—the first shots of the Revolution, by some reckonings. (A few days earlier Rhode Island patriots had seized forty-four artillery pieces from Fort George in Newport Harbor, but that installation was undefended at the time.) Before they could do any more, the mob knocked down the doors and overpowered them. The raiders made off with ninety-seven kegs of powder, which they distributed to hiding places in neighboring towns.
The next day, as patriots from the area poured into Portsmouth, including a party from Exeter led by Nathaniel Folsom, Governor Wentworth issued a call for the militia to suppress them. No one responded. He met with John Sullivan of Durham, who had taken charge of the rebels, and succeeded only in gaining a little time. (Sullivan and Folsom had made up New Hampshire’s delegation to the Continental Congress.) That evening Sullivan and his band rowed over to the fort. The forty-odd Durham men were accompanied by about two hundred others.
This time Cochran put up no resistance to the intruders. Working through the night, they took sixteen light cannon, sixty muskets, some cannonballs and carriages, and assorted other matériel, leaving behind forty-five heavy cannon. Before they could return to liberate them, HMS Canceaux sailed into Piscataqua Harbor, to be joined two days later by HMS Scarborough. The warships’ arrival ended the uprising, leaving the citizens of New Hampshire quiet but sullenly resentful, and—like the gunpowder they had captured from the fort—needing only a spark to set them off.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
