November 27, 2007
What People Know or Don’t Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 02:45 PM EST For a long time, the most frightening comment I had ever heard was made by my cousin, who sidled up to me one day on a very important errand. She said that she and her husband—college graduates—had been talking a few days before, and her husband wanted to know when Winston Churchill was President. That, however, has now been bumped to second-place. Over Thanksgiving, a friend in New England told me about some friends, men in their eighties, who visited a local school on Veterans Day to describe their experiences to the students. They walked into the appointed classroom and then stood in a state of shock as the teacher introduced them as veterans of World War 11. Any self-respecting graduate student could probably prove that World War II was, as a matter of actual fact, the eleventh world war in the planet’s history—but no matter. With such a thorough respect for history abounding, the world will get to No. 11 soon enough.
November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 10:40 AM EST “This is as plain as adding up the weights of three small hogs.”
With the offhand manner of the truly ardent salesman, Abraham Lincoln tried every trick he knew to convince opposition voters in 1856 that the Electoral College was a trap, that it would lead people into “throwing their votes away,” in his words, and that, in short, if they really wanted their man to be President, they would support his man.
It was as plain to Lincoln as adding up the weights of pigs.
The distorting influence of the Electoral College is just as obvious 151 years later, with 42 states actively considering changes to their system of presidential voting.
Lincoln gave the subject of electoral voting a great deal of thought. Perhaps too much. In the drive to make people understand, he grew desperate. He stooped low: He invented junk mail. (It is one of the more shocking revelations I was forced to make in my book The Case of Abraham Lincoln.)
In Illinois, at any rate, junk mail had never been seen before—a printed letter carefully disguised as a handwritten one and distributed in bulk to unsuspecting voters. The subject was the electoral outlook, and the theme was that either people played the system’s game or risked wasting their votes.
“Be not deceived,” Lincoln exhorted each recipient. (They already were—if they believed they were holding a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln.)
The people who received the form letter ought to have heeded the message anyway. Lincoln cared passionately about the three-way campaign for the White House, it being the battle that succeeded in drawing him into the Republican Party.
He decided that the most cunning strategy against the electoral college was to take advantage its very essence, proxy voting. To salvage hope for the other candidates, the election in Illinois had to mean something, its electoral votes had to be up for grabs.
States such as New York and Texas haven’t known that sensation in years. In 1856 Illinois wasn’t any different. James Buchanan seemed to have it sewn up.
Most people, then or now, groused a little and then went through the motions of casting a vote in a state with a foregone conclusion.
Lincoln was different. A man comforted by logic, he was actively annoyed by the Electoral College. His plan in the three-way race of Buchanan, Frémont, and Fillmore was typical of his objective thinking.
“Fremont and Fillmore men,” Lincoln wrote, “unite on one entire ticket, with the understanding that that ticket, if elected, shall cast the vote of the State, for whichever of the two shall be known to have received the larger number of electoral votes, in the other states.” It may not have taken hold, but it was incisive.
The kind of frustrations that Lincoln felt toward the Electoral College during the campaign haven’t faded, nor has the spirit behind his solution. A plan circulating in state legislatures today, and already passed in Maryland, echoes the Lincoln scheme. When states representing at least 270 electoral votes adopt the same law, each will be pledged to give its entire electoral vote to the candidate winning the popular vote nationally. The bill does require a leap of faith in the belief that the majority should rule—a concept known in the past as democracy.
Neither Lincoln’s plan nor the one currently under discussion dallies with the mere abolition of the Electoral College. They each endeavor instead to outwit it, as it has outwitted voters, as well as some very good candidates, ever since its inception.
November 19, 2007
I’d Rather Be Wrong Than Corrected Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 05:10 PM EST I am drawn to the work of Charles and Ray Eames, which astonishes me, actually, because they were designing furniture in the modern days of the mid–twentieth century and I generally place the cutoff date for worthwhile furniture at about 1802. I often remark, in fact, upon the fact that Federal furniture seems completely at home with an Eames lounge chair—and when I often remark upon that fact, I know enough to pronounce the name Ames chair. In the chatter of antique-furniture collectors, I have never heard it otherwise. Last week, I watched a documentary about the Eameses’ California house, with narration by their grandson. He, however, pronounced the name Eems. If history conspires on an untruth, it has to be corrected, of course. And with ferocity. But, more specifically, if I run around referring to Eeeems chairs, I will look unlettered and uncouth, until someone nearby takes pity and nudges a little Ames into the conversation. I think I’ll stick with Ames. But then, one day, some super sophisticate will pronounce it Eeeeeems in my presence, sophisticates tending to drawl, and I will be the dumbbell trying to explain that I knew how to pronounce—but—too lazy—why bother—funny isn’t it? I’m going back to Federal furniture, and this time, for good.
November 6, 2007
Lincoln and the Margin of Error Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 03:15 PM EST Eighty years before political polling became a science, and three months before the 1856 election, Abraham Lincoln made his prediction—his projection, in the modern parlance—of the results in Illinois. Lincoln wasn’t running for anything that year, but the election renewed his political prospects, drawing him into a decision to join the nascent Republican Party. I am mindful of his 1856 conundrums during this 2007 election year, because they are the stuff of my book The Case of Abraham Lincoln, about which I am giving talks at the drop of a hat these days. The new party would help Lincoln, of course, but he helped it first, giving speeches all over Illinois that helped to shape its stance and spirit. In his travels, Lincoln was a walking-talking news-gathering machine, consuming newspapers and talking to practically everyone. He had the knack of weighting such comments according to who was uttering them and what was said to prompt the discussion. In August, he made his projection of the November results. Here is how close he came: Candidate: Actual result / Lincoln’s Prediction Buchanan (Dem.): 44.1 percent / 46.2 percent
Fremont (Rep.): 40.2 percent / 42.4 percent
Fillmore (Know-Nothing): 15.7 percent / 11.4 percent [Simplified from The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder and the Making of Great President] Lincoln was a remarkable politician. And not a bad mathematician. In the end, his prediction was off by an average of only 2.9 percent—even less than the modern-day margin of error.
October 12, 2007
“Laws Die; Books Never” (Bulwer-Lytton)—Or Almost Never Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 10:20 AM EST I made a special trip to the university library near my house, just to look up something in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, the index of magazine articles printed during the twentieth century. I’ve been doing the same thing roughly my whole life—same Reader’s Guides, same place on the shelves. Except that yesterday, they were gone. The librarian said the decision had been made to throw out nearly all of the Reader’s Guides in order to save space, since the content is now on a database. I might have pointed out that a database is not a book. It can’t impart the power of periphery or of perspective. Apparently, however, that ship has sailed, or that garbage truck has left the loading dock of America’s libraries, choose your metaphor. I am certainly inured to computer research, however, and so the librarian and I looked up the database. First we couldn’t find it, and then it wouldn’t work—or was it the other way around. Ever optimistic, I asked where it was that they kept the Reader’s Guides that they hadn’t thrown out. Maybe they had made a mistake and kept July 1934 to August 1935. She looked that up and told me that whatever was left was on the second floor. The second floor was actually quite hollow, except for row upon row of metal bookshelves, all empty and making a tinny sound in answer to my heels, a sound with a sting, when one wonders which books were thrown out to make it possible. The Reader’s Guides were nowhere in sight. But I congratulate the librarians on achieving their goal: They’d certainly freed up lots and lots of space. A sentimental confession: when I was writing my new book on Lincoln (The Case of Abraham Lincoln: Murder, Adultery and the Making of a Great President), I used to dream not about topping the bestseller list or of being short-listed for the Booker Prize (which is for fiction anyway), but of seeing the book added to the Lincoln section at some of my favorite libraries. For a moment, walking out of the university library in question, I doubted that libraries are going to last long enough for my Lincoln book (it comes out in November). In the one I was in, the one that was making all the space by throwing out books, one half of the ground floor was boarded up and draped with a huge sign: “Café Coming in November!” Praise be: They have the space for a coffee shop. After all, you can get a copy of the Reader’s Guide for July 1934 to August 1935 on almost any corner, but where can you find a cup of hot coffee? Don’t call me old-fashioned because I repeat the one thing I know: An Internet café is not a library. And a database is not a book.
February 12, 2007
Primary Envy Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 12:55 PM EST I live in New York State, which is to say that I am openly jealous of the people in Iowa, who not only have the biggest influence in the primaries, being the first to vote, but have the chance to meet the candidates to the point of ennui—trying them out, taking them to task, flipping pancakes with them. No primary candidate has been in New York (or about 40 other states) since—well, maybe Ted Kennedy. Remember when he ran? The early primary (or caucus) is supposed to keep retail politics alive, so I understand. The people of Iowa act as surrogates for the rest of us. I would like to fire the people of Iowa as my surrogate. Looking at the historical statistics, two thirds of them can’t be bothered to vote in the caucus. After all of the attention (and tens of millions of dollars) showered on the state, only 12.2 percent of eligible Iowans voted in the 2004 primary. In other presidential years, when the both parties had a race in contention, the rate was only a little higher. It is a rousing year when as many as a quarter of them manage to finish their full stacks and cast a vote. Ungrateful urchins! New Hampshire isn’t much better, by the way. Here is a better proposal. Whatever state has the highest turnout in the presidential primary is automatically scheduled as the first primary in the country four years later. Reward the people who care enough to vote.
November 15, 2006
Caught My Eye Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 11:00 AM EST I am reading more 1856 newspapers than 2006 ones these days—research on a lawyer named A. Lincoln. As usual, when it comes to old newspapers, I am continually haunted by the little stories off to the side. Read this one, for instance:
“A very curious instance of confusion has taken place in a family in Albany. A mother and her daughter were both confined on the same day, each having a little son. In the bustle of the moment, both babies were placed in a cradle together, and, to the confusion of the mothers, when the youngsters were taken from the cradle they were unable to tell which was the mother’s and which was the daughter’s son—a matter which of course must ever remain a mystery—the family is in great distress over the affair.”
That’s not just an article, it’s a recipe for an 800-page novel. Just add a summer on an island and a box of foolscap paper.
November 14, 2006
Maybe That’s Why They Were in a Hurry to Win and Bring the Soldiers Home . . . Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 09:45 AM EST An abbreviated list of U.S. war dead in 1944:
Marine Pfc. Stephen P. Hopkins, son of Assistant to the President Harry Hopkins, at sea in the Marshall Islands.
1st Lt. Peter G. Lehman, son of U.N. administrator (and former New York Governor) Herbert Lehman, in a bomber crash in England.
Marine Sgt. Peter B. Saltonstall, son of Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltonstall, in jungle fighting in Guam.
Joseph Kennedy, Jr., son of the former ambassador to Britain, in a plane crash off the English coast.
Lt. Wells Lewis, son of the novelist Sinclair Lewis, in fighting in France.
August 17, 2006
The Faceless Enemy Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 12:00 PM EST “I want to fight in a war like World War II, I want to fight an enemy, And this, out here . . . it’ s a faceless enemy.”
That was a quote from an Army sergeant on active duty in Iraq. I read it in Newsweek a day or two after the British foiled the plot to crash nine airplanes in mid-flight.
A day later I heard NBC anchorman Brian Williams giving time to the same yearnings: “Here in London Thursday,” he said on the evening news, “a World War II veteran seemed downright wistful when he told me: At least during World War II he knew whom to shoot at . . . based on the shape of their helmets. This new enemy wears no such thing.”
Maybe this is new—sort of—for Western Front types like British and Americans. World War II did have its clear-cut battle lines, separating Us and Them, but it also had terrorism, according to the current definition. Yugoslavia and Greece, as examples, were dizzied by civilian warfare: terrorism. And the enemy was certainly faceless.
In locales across the lesser-known war zones of WWII, just as today, and with no uniform in sight, trains and buildings suddenly blew up. And it just wasn’t fair then, either.
June 15, 2006
The Flight of the Hump Pilots Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 09:00 AM EST The mail arrived at my uncle’s house on a Monday as June began, and he was reading through it, sitting at the table where breakfast had been served. I was a room away, and my father was in the kitchen, my aunt on the other side of the house. My uncle called all of us in to see a magazine that had just come, holding it out and saying nothing more than, “Will you look at this?” That was hardly unusual; my uncle, lively and sly at the same time, can be counted on to stir up just such a quiet morning as that Monday was, yet there was a note of surprise in his voice that wasn’t just kidding around.
I glanced across the cover of the magazine, fairly jostling it in my effort to be the first to spot something familiar, such as his name, or something conspicuous, such as a mistake embarrassing to the editors. The title of the magazine was “China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association.” That was nothing noteworthy for anyone who knows my uncle.
During World War II, Sgt. Howard Francis Berk was in the Army Air Forces, part of the 1330th Base Unit, which was stationed mostly in Jorhat and Assam, India. The 1330th was part of a massive effort to support the Chinese resistance to the Japanese by keeping supplies flowing along the only plausible route. And the only plausible route, at that point in the war, really wasn’t very plausible at all. It ran to China from northern India over the Himalayas—the “Hump.” As many as 15,000 Americans at one time were assigned to operate it. Due to Japanese fighters, cruel weather and the danger of flying fully loaded cargo planes over the earth’s highest roadblocks, 3,605 airplanes crashed in the effort. “We used to navigate by the wrecks,” my uncle once told me.
I grew up knowing about the C-B-I theater of war, thanks to my uncle, and therefore I skimmed past the title of the magazine to keep searching in my haste to discern whatever it was that had struck him as so dramatic. The pictures on the cover consisted of a shoulder patch (captioned “1942-1945”), a photo of a memorial, a photo of an airplane, and another patch. I leapt to the wobbling conclusion that my Uncle Howard was thinking that I, of all people, didn’t realize that he was in the China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association. With that, I flunked the moment.
He pointed to the bottom of the cover. “Membership Newsletter,” it said. He read the rest. “March 2006,” he said out loud, “Final Issue.”
I gasped. I admit it. The last two words carried the reality of an obituary reporting the death of a neglected friend. Of course I know perfectly well that World War Two veterans are going fast these days. But the ranks are supposed to dwindle against time, not surrender to it. “It has been a great run,” wrote the president of the Hump Pilots Association on the inside, “It is very sad that the Association must be dissolved. But time has caught up with us and we must give in.”
I have been tempted ever since to conclude that I don’t much like the idea of valiant Hump pilots and their crew members giving in. They never, by God, did that in the Himalayas. And so forth. But anyone who could fly fully loaded planes over the Himalayas is nothing if not coolly, if cruelly, realistic. The Hump pilots are disappearing of their own volition, in their own way, and according to their own time.
May 26, 2006
Internet Research with Dimension Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 09:40 AM EST A website called Internet Archive Wayback Machine has archived 55 billion pages of the Internet through the years, from 1994 to the present. If you’re curious, you can see the first incarnations of signature sites such as Yahoo!—which is not that all that different, graphically, from today’s version—or Amazon or eBay or even AmericanHeritage.com. For historical researchers, the site allows the use of Internet articles and opinion contemporary with unfolding events (some of which are collected in special sections; scroll down the homepage to see). The homepage is at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php.
November 9, 2005
An Exclusive Interview with the Un-Famous One Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 03:00 PM EST With two months to go before Morrow publishes our book, I am getting nervous about plans for a book tour. So far I haven’t heard a thing. The book is Parish Priest, a biography of Father Michael McGivney. The coauthors are Douglas Brinkley and me. Doug is famous, you see, and rightly so, with two bestsellers of late, Tour of Duty, which is about John Kerry, and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, which is about D-Day. He is also on television quite often as a commentator. I’m not quite as famous, I admit. Though I do command a certain following at the DeWitt, New York, Barnes & Noble. Last Friday I called the publicity person at the publishing house. He confirmed that there indeed are plans to send Doug to a couple of cities. He said there are no plans to send me anywhere. I am not at all certain he knows who I am. Not even the DeWitt Barnes & Noble. It’s only a quarter-mile from my house. I could walk there, if it would save the company expense money. A person who does not have a complex could get a complex. Albeit, Doug is more famous than I am. Granted, he’s nicer, too. But I can contribute something to publicity. One time at a book-convention signing party, I had a longer line than Roger Ebert. Doesn’t that count for something? I telephoned our literary agent today and tried to cheer myself up by asking about the full-page ads that are planned for The New York Times and other big papers. It always does my heart good to think about those. I am going to have them framed and put up on the wall. I shall be immortal in my guestroom. What a coincidence: The agent had just seen the dummies for the ads, so he told me. They forgot to include my name.
November 8, 2005
The Echo of a President Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 05:00 PM EST A little more than a hundred years ago, when America was manipulated by false reports into fighting the Spanish-American War, the United States was left afterward in occupation of the Philippines. It would have been hard to find a country farther away or more foreign. As the years dragged by and our Army remained, the Philippines teetered constantly on the edge of anarchy, revolution, civil war—or something else even more chaotic than the unrest fomented by the occupation. Insurrectionists attacked American soldiers, often in gruesome style. Far from home, fighting a frustrating foe, the soldiers responded with the torture of captured Filipinos. By 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt was President, the methods used by U.S. soldiers were becoming public knowledge. In response, some Americans expressed the belief that torture was necessary for the greater good. Some were outraged. Some didn’t care what happened to Filipinos anyway. President Roosevelt, who knew something about war, having been a soldier, and about courage as well, fired off a telegram to the American Commander in the Philippines: THE PRESIDENT DESIRES TO KNOW IN THE FULLEST AND MOST CIRCUMSTANTIAL MANNER ALL THE FACTS. . . . FOR THE VERY REASON THAT THE PRESIDENT INTENDS TO BACK UP THE ARMY IN THE HEARTIEST FASHION IN EVERY LAWFUL AND LEGITIMATE METHOD OF DOING ITS WORK. HE ALSO INTENDS TO SEE THAT THE MOST VIGOROUS CARE IS EXERCISED TO DETECT AND PREVENT ANY CRUELTY OR BRUTALITY. AND THAT MEN WHO ARE GUILTY THEREOF ARE PUNISHED. GREAT AS THE PROVOCATION HAS BEEN IN DEALING WITH FOES WHO HABITUALLY RESORT TO TREACHERY MURDER AND TORTURE AGAINST OUR MEN, NOTHING CAN JUSTIFY THE USE OF TORTURE OR INHUMAN CONDUCT OF ANY KIND ON THE PART OF THE AMERICAN ARMY.
September 17, 2005
A New Measuring Stick Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 07:00 AM EST The latest amazing trick to try on the Internet is to search for the word “failure” on Google. Wait until you see what comes up. Go ahead—and then come back… In the nineteenth century, people in the public eye were judged only by newspaper editors, curmudgeonly as they could be. In the twentieth century, polls held the fate of anyone with ambition in politics. Now, apparently, a man is only as good as his search terms.
September 16, 2005
On Television Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 01:30 PM EST Last evening, I watched a show on the Discovery Channel about a trio of young adults on a journey to meet up with the rest of their family. They had names. They had personalities. And they had, therefore, their clashes. They had triumphs and tragedies, too, and everything else you might expect in a Southern novel. But the program was not about Raintree County, it was about Europe during the Ice Age, and the people were prehistoric. This show, The Ice World, was an example of a new generation of documentaries. It is a world quite apart from the old days of Edward R. Murrow and NBC White Paper. Nowadays, directors who are tired of scouring archives for film clips, eight seconds at a time, just hire actors and create new film, along with creating names, personalities, and suitable adventures. It all started about five years ago with computer-animated dinosaurs—and me sitting there actually feeling teary over some invented dinosaur baby getting gobbled up by a mean old big dinosaur. Isn’t that what we used to call a fairy tale? Now the new fiction has moved massively into nonfiction television. In The Ice World, one of the people was named Aki. Now, who on earth knows what prehistoric people called each other? Aki seems an awful lot like a modern version of a primitive name. Who is to say that a cave man couldn’t be named Maximilian? There isn’t anything wrong with not knowing every detail of human history. But there is something very wrong with filling in facts—except in fairy tales.
September 12, 2005
Facta, Non Verba Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 02:05 PM EST At 9:05 a.m. on December 6, 1917, an ammunition ship called the Mont Blanc blew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, causing a chain reaction among the many other explosives boats crowding the harbor and obliterating one and a half square miles of the small city. A man-made tidal wave followed. More than 1,600 people out of the population of about 45,000 were killed instantly; 9,000 were badly injured by the force of the explosion or by pieces of ships and the city raining down on them. Many of the rest were homeless. At 9:00 p.m. on December 6, 1917—just twelve hours later—a train loaded with medical supplies left Boston for Halifax. That was only the start; the next day, the Bostonians were really prepared. They sent a special train to Halifax, carrying all of the equipment and furniture needed for a 500-bed emergency hospital. Also aboard were 25 physicians, 68 nurses, eight orderlies, and two obstetricians. The inclusion of the obstetricians (in what seemed to be strictly a trauma situation) surprised the people in Halifax, until they found themselves inundated with premature births over the subsequent week. The Bostonians had anticipated that. A few days later, when Boston’s good Samaritans heard that a blizzard was headed for Halifax, they took it upon themselves to send 837 cases of glass, putty, and tools and twenty-five glaziers to reinstall the windows blown out by the explosion. The response from Boston, entirely unbidden, casts shame on all of us who sat by the television, waiting for the U.S. government to act in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Of course, the crisis cast sickening shame on the government. But it was no shining hour for individual initiative, either.
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