Buffalo and Moravia duke it out

Buffalo and Moravia, N.Y., are vying for a piece of the Millard Fillmore action. The two communities both claim this mostly forgotten president, whose very name is associated with mediocrity, and whose oft-cited greatest achievement—installing a bathtub in the White House—was a hoax perpetrated by the writer H.L. Mencken . The U.S. Mint this week is releasing the Millard Fillmore presidential dollar coin, with an official launch ceremony on Thursday in Moravia (pop. 4,000), near his birthplace. Some people in Buffalo are miffed.

Fillmore, you see, is buried in Buffalo, where he made his mark as the first chancellor of the University at Buffalo, founding member and first president of the Buffalo Club, and founder of the Buffalo Historical society.

Members of Moravia's historical society say there's more than enough Millard Fillmore to go around. Buffalo can claim Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president, who began his career there. "As a small town, we just have a few moments of history that are ours—and Fillmore is one of them," says Roger Phillips, president of the Cayuga-Owasco Lakes Historical Society.

This has to prove that there is a website for nearly everything.

Joyce Hackett Smith, former president of the historical society and a distant cousin of Fillmore's, notes that the 13th president is more apt to be overlooked in a big city like Buffalo, which has a population of about 272,600, while every child at Millard Fillmore Elementary School in Moravia learns a lot about Fillmore

A quarter of a million a big city? What does that make NYC?

"We spent quite a lot of time in history class going over the things that Fillmore did," says 57-year-old Lee Conklin, a lifelong Moravian and owner of an auto-parts store there. The late Robert Scarry, a Moravia history teacher, wrote a book detailing the president's life.

Long Beach Library owns the book.

Millard Fillmore was born on Jan. 7, 1800, several miles outside Moravia in what is now Summerhill and became president following the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850. Fillmore's presidency is marked by his signing and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act providing for the return of runaway slaves. History has punished him for that, but supporters say it was his way of trying to keep the country united. Fillmore made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1856 as a member of the American party, derisively known as the Know-Nothing party, after his former party, the Whigs, fell apart over the issue of slavery.

Not a great record.

His name is attached to cartoonist Bruce Tinsley's "Mallard Fillmore" comic strip, which features a right-leaning duck reporter who goes after the media, not to mention liberal politicians. And Fillmore's reputation for being ignored takes center stage in George Pendle's fictional and tongue-in-cheek account of Fillmore's life in "The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President," published in 2007.

 

Fillmore did get a burst of recognition in 2008 from auto maker Kia Motors and its "Unheard of Presidents' Day" sale. The commercial made reference to the bathtub "legacy," and featured a Millard Fillmore soap-on-a-rope. The historical society in Moravia got its hands on a box of soaps-on-a-rope for its collection, says Mr. Phillips.

One self-proclaimed Fillmorephile, Jeff Amdur of Baltimore, has been anticipating the launch of the Fillmore dollar, even though he won't be able to make it to either of the two ceremonies.

"After I got a Zachary Taylor dollar in change last year, I knew Millard's time was coming up," he says.

New Focus on an Odd Spot

National Archives/Reuters - 'SICK MAN AT YALTA' During the cold war, detractors claimed that Stalin took advantage of Roosevelt's ill health at the Allied conference in 1945, just before the president died.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt died unexpectedly on April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Ga., the White House lost no time announcing a cause of death.

The 63-year-old president, the shocked and grieving nation was told, had died of cerebral hemorrhage. (“Last Words,” read a front-page headline in The New York Times: “ ‘I Have a Terrific Headache.’ ”)

That Roosevelt died of a stroke is undisputed. But what caused it is a medical mystery that has persisted to this day, a mystery heightened by the secrecy in which he, his aides and his doctors always insisted on shrouding his health.

Now a new book — “F.D.R.’s Deadly Secret,” by a neurologist, Dr. Steven Lomazow, and a journalist, Eric Fettmann (PublicAffairs) — revives an intriguing theory. Look closely at Roosevelt’s portraits over his 12-year presidency. In his first two terms, there is a dark spot over his left eyebrow. It seems to grow and then mysteriously vanishes sometime around 1940, leaving a small scar.

Was the spot a harmless mole? Or a cancerous melanoma that spread to contribute to, or even cause, his death? Melanomas, after all, are known for causing strokes from bleeding when they spread to the brain. This hypothesis is not new.


 

Tracking F.D.R’s Mole


The speculation about a melanoma cannot be verified because there was no autopsy and no known biopsy, and most of Roosevelt’s medical records disappeared shortly after his death from a safe in the United States Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md.

Disappeared? Or were made to disappear?


Even in the 1940s, some Washington insiders claimed that Roosevelt knew he was seriously ill, if not dying, when he ran for his final term, and that was one of the reasons he dumped his vice president, Henry A. Wallace, from the Democratic ticket in favor of Harry S. Truman. But most historians say he picked Truman for political reasons, not for his qualifications.

Lincoln letter for sale

Abraham Lincoln letter goes up for sale

President's acknowledgement of a meeting with an eight-year-old boy could fetch £36,000

* Ed Pilkington in New York
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 November 2009 19.37 GMT

President Abraham Lincoln letter

The letter President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a boy in 1861. Photograph: Raab Collection/AP

The lesson of history for any small child is that if you are lucky enough to be presented to the future president of the US, then make sure you have evidence of the encounter before bragging about it to your classmates.

George Patten, aged eight, discovered the bitter truth of that maxim in 1860 after he boasted at school about having met Abraham Lincoln, having been introduced to the then presidential candidate with his journalist father.

The boy's friends thought he had made the story up, and bullied him. To settle the matter, Patten's teacher wrote to the White House asking for clarification about whether there was any truth to the anecdote.

On 19 March 1861, two weeks after his inauguration and despite being preoccupied with forming an administration and the early slide into civil war, Lincoln took the trouble to reply: "To whom it may concern: I did see and talk with George Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois. Respectfully, A. Lincoln."

The letter has now been put up for auction by Philadelphia's Raab Collection at an estimated price of $60,000 (£36,000).

Last year another letter written by Lincoln to a group of children sold for $3.4m – a record for a manuscript in the United States.

That was an 1864 reply to a petition made by 195 children who asked him to ensure the freedom of "all the slave children in this country".

In the letter, dated 5 April 1864, he wrote: "Please tell these little people I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy, and that while I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust that they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it."

Trained in the U.S., Scientist Became China's 'Rocket King'

Imaginechina/Associated Press - Scientist Qian Xuesen shown in Beijing, China, in 1957. He died on Oct. 31 at the age of 98



"He was Joe McCarthy's present to the Chinese," says John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "It was the anti-Communist mood in the 1950s that led him home."

Monopoly

This week, game players and enthusiasts from 40 countries will descend upon Las Vegas to compete in the Monopoly World Championship, held roughly every four years. The winner of the Hasbro Inc.-sponsored tournament will take home $20,580 -- the precise sum stashed in the title's make-believe bank.

But one man who is perhaps the game's most obsessive follower won't be attending.

Ralph Anspach, an 83-year-old economics professor, spent decades locked in a real-life battle with Monopoly and its corporate owners. The campaign dented his finances, sent him on a nationwide trek for intelligence and sparked a legal case that reached the steps of the Supreme Court.

Prof. Anspach's woes began with a real-life trademark fight for the right to sell his own game, called Anti-Monopoly. Along the way, he says he helped to publicize the little-known origins of the classic American game.





The official history of Monopoly, a version of which appears on Hasbro's Web site, describes how Charles B. Darrow developed Monopoly during the Great Depression. Parker Brothers, which was later acquired by Hasbro, bought the impoverished heater salesman's patent in 1935 and registered the Monopoly trademark. Since then, the company says, an estimated 750 million copies of Monopoly have been sold worldwide.

The Monopoly "legend," as Hasbro calls it, "is a corporate fairy tale," says Prof. Anspach, who argues that the company fails to acknowledge key players in the game's genesis.

Prof. Anspach played his first game of Monopoly as a child in the mid-1930s in Czechoslovakia. In 1938, his family fled Europe to America on the cusp of the Holocaust. Years later, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and began teaching at San Francisco State University. One day in the 1970s, Prof. Anspach tried to explain oil cartels and the downside of monopolies to his 8-year-old son, William. The economist searched toy stores for a more philosophically pleasing alternative to Monopoly, but found nothing.

I remember playing it, as a kid, for such a long time that my knees were sore from squatting in front of the board.

He then set out to create a game that would be a sort of "Monopoly backwards," in which players compete to break up existing monopolies rather than create them. He called it "Anti-Monopoly." The game sold 200,000 copies the first year.

In February 1974, Prof. Anspach received a letter from an attorney for Parker Brothers requesting he immediately stop peddling Anti-Monopoly. The company objected to the use of its trademarked Monopoly name.

3

Interesting picture

Because They Believe

In his new book, Norman Podhoretz has some fine exasperated fun with the wildness of interpretation on the Jewish left, and of course spares the Jewish right any culpability for the same sin. So it is worth recalling that a few years ago he published a book about the prophets in which they emerged as the neoconservatives of ancient Israel. Their castigations of the sacrifice of children prompted a reflection on the “pagan practice” of the entry of women into the work force.

Another fine conservative tenet, this paganism.

Norman Podhoretz loves his people and loves his country, and I salute him for it, since I love the same people and the same country. But this is a dreary book. Its author has a completely axiomatic mind that is quite content to maintain itself in a permanent condition of apocalyptic excitation. His perspective is so settled, so confirmed, that it is a wonder he is not too bored to write. The veracity of everything he believes is so overwhelmingly obvious to him that he no longer troubles to argue for it. Instead there is only bewilderment that others do not see it, too. “Why Are Jews Liberals?” is a document of his bewilderment; and there is a Henry Higgins-­like poignancy to his discovery that his brethren are not more like himself. But the refusal of others to assent to his beliefs is portrayed by Podhoretz not as a principled disagreement that is worthy of respect, but as a human failing. Jews are liberals, he concludes, as a consequence of “willful blindness and denial.” He has a philosophy. They have a psychology.

Such was what I saw in Podhoretz's article in the Wall Street Journal last week, either an excerpt from, or a distillation of, his primary argument: liberal Jews aren't really Jewish; their liberalism is their religion.
Podhoretz, Norman. (2009). Why are Jews liberals? New York: Doubleday.



There was a time, though it was not a long time, when there was a basis in reality for the Jewish hope in a liberalizing society and a secularizing culture. What else should the Jews of modernity have done — ­chanted the Psalms and waited for Reagan? It is curious that Podhoretz neglects to discuss Zionism in his account of the emergence of Jewish liberalism, since it was born of the same repudiation of inherited circumstances and the same recovery of historical agency, and it proceeded to create a Jewish society in the Middle East that was designed to fulfill the progressive ideals of Europe. Podhoretz grasps the European tragedy, but without a tragic sense. All that matters to him is who was wrong.

So it seems, and Podhoretz leaves, and clearly has, no doubt that it is liberals who are wrong.

When they lost their hopes for equality and decency in Europe and Russia, many of the Jews who kindled to the mobility of history responded with mobility of their own — some of them to the land of Israel, most of them to America.

And in America Jews found deliverance from European anti-Semitism and progroms, and found a better life. And so they became Democrats.

“The reason Jews had been attracted to the Democratic Party in the first place,” Podhoretz writes, “was that it represented the closest American counterpart to the forces on the left that had favored Jewish emancipation in Europe.” What baffles him, what pains him, is that their attraction to the Democratic Party has never waned. This steadfast allegiance to the Democratic Party, Podhoretz insists, now flies in the face of Jewish interests.

It is more in the name of Jewish interests than of Jewish ideas that Podhoretz makes his complaint about the Jewish rejection of the Republicans. But nowhere in his book does he explain precisely how the interests of Jews are served by the Republican positions on government, health care, tax policy, gun control, abortion, gay rights, the environment, and so on. Affirmative action is a genuinely excruciating question, and the ideal of color-blindness has been treated too harshly and too sloppily in recent decades; but surely this is a matter about which good people may disagree. It is, in any event, a matter about which liberals differ not only with conservatives, but also among themselves. Like conservatives, like Jews, liberals squabble. I share Podhoretz’s concern that the American Jewish attitude toward Christian conservatives too often looks like contempt, but not his view, which seems to me preposterous, that the American public square has been stripped of religious expressions. I run into Jesus all the time. And I pity the religion that requires politics and politicians for its validation.

Not contempt, really, but a distaste for the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Often it seems as the evangelicals are using Jews as an entry way into Jerusalem and as a cover for their dislike, or more, of Arabs.

The Jewish interest that makes Podhoretz most desperate for a Jewish defection to the Republicans is Israel. While the abandonment of Israel by an American government seems to me unimaginable, and not only for reasons of politics, Podhoretz is not mistaken when he declares that the enthusiasm for Israel among conservatives is real and new and deep. He is also correct that what sympathy there is for the Palestinians in American politics is to be found largely among Democrats. The problem is that he cannot suppose that sympathy for the Palestinians may coexist with sympathy, and even love, for Israel.

He is an exclusivist: if you do not support Israel the way I do, then you oppose it. I can not agree with either on the conservative support for Israel.

If you think that the survival of Israel requires the establishment of Palestine, because the absorption of millions of Palestinians into Israel, in an annexation or an occupation, will destroy the Jewish character or the democratic character of the state, then Podhoretz’s scorn for the peace process will not suffice as an account of Israel’s situation. If you think that the establishment of Palestine threatens the survival of Israel, because the Palestinians desire only the abolition of the Jewish state and will never be satisfied with a territorial compromise, then Podhoretz’s suspicion of any American president who does not merely comply with the demands of the Israeli government will strike you as the apotheosis of fidelity.

Democratic character?

What counts is your analysis of the problem — of security and morality, of Israelis and Palestinians. Podhoretz does not provide an analysis; he assumes one, doctrinally. He is justified in his view that the left, or a lot of it, now regards Israel coldly. Indeed, it is in many quarters cruelly engaged in the revival of the “one-state solution,” which for demographic reasons is nothing other than Greater Palestine. But the intellectual confrontation with these poisons has frequently been the work of liberals. After all, you cannot denounce a one-state solution unless you believe in a two-state solution.

Really?

What explains the stubborn affinity of American Jews for liberalism and the Democratic Party? Not “Jewish values,” he instructs. I concur: There are many values in Judaism and not all of them are Democratic, or even democratic. Podhoretz also considers the influence, “even unto the fourth generation,” of Menshevik Jews who fled to America, and the gradual attenuation of Marxism into social democracy and of social democracy into liberalism; but even he cannot persuade himself that the blame for Barack Obama’s success among American Jews belongs to Martov.

Yet, who defines what is Jewish? Just the rabbis and the sages?

In this vein of anti-intellectual spite, Podhoretz invents “the Torah of liberalism”: if it were not absurd, then they would not believe it. And if he does not believe it, then it is absurd. As if from the pulpit, he scolds that “where the Torah of contemporary liberalism conflicts with the Torah of Judaism, it is the Torah of liberalism that prevails and the Torah of Judaism that must give way.”

Oy vay.

So American Jewish liberals are not only bad Americans, they are also bad Jews. And their stubbornness is owed to their stubbornness. They are stiff-necked. The explanatory power of this notion is obviously very limited. It is, in fact, another kind of sputtering. The alternative, of course, would be to consider the possibility that liberalism is not just an undifferentiated darkness, and that there may be some substance to what some liberals believe about some principles and some policies. But those would be heretical thoughts, which are unlikely in a heresy hunter. He knows exactly what “the Torah of Judaism” is, and what it is not. For the Torah of contemporary conservatism never conflicts with the Torah of Judaism, and conservatism is never thoughtlessly or dogmatically held.

He's right, and he knows it; he also knows liberals are wrong. Ole Norm is quite the sage, he thinks of himself.

We are proven by the other, not by the same. The question of whether liberalism or conservatism does more for the helpless and the downtrodden, for the ones who are not like us, will be endlessly debated, and it is not a Jewish debate; but if the answer is liberalism, then the political history of American Jewry is neither a mystery nor a scandal.

Why Are Jews Liberals?

One of the most extraordinary features of Barack Obama's victory over John McCain was his capture of 78% of the Jewish vote. To be sure, there was nothing extraordinary about the number itself. Since 1928, the average Jewish vote for the Democrat in presidential elections has been an amazing 75%—far higher than that of any other ethno-religious group.

Yet there were reasons to think that it would be different in 2008. The main one was Israel. Despite some slippage in concern for Israel among American Jews, most of them were still telling pollsters that their votes would be strongly influenced by the positions of the two candidates on the Jewish state. This being the case, Mr. McCain's long history of sympathy with Israel should have given him a distinct advantage over Mr. Obama, whose own history consisted of associating with outright enemies of the Jewish state like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the historian Rashid Khalidi.

Guilt by association isn't terribly convincing. More a smear than anything else, its dogmatism is insulting, really.

All the other ethno-religious groups that, like the Jews, formed part of the coalition forged by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s have followed the rule that increasing prosperity generally leads to an increasing identification with the Republican Party. But not the Jews. As the late Jewish scholar Milton Himmelfarb said in the 1950s: "Jews earn like Episcopalians"—then the most prosperous minority group in America—"and vote like Puerto Ricans," who were then the poorest.

Increasing prosperity leads to conservatism: it is true, but also not true: not all liberals are poor.

Most American Jews sincerely believe that their liberalism, together with their commitment to the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle, stems from the teachings of Judaism and reflects the heritage of "Jewish values." But if this theory were valid, the Orthodox would be the most liberal sector of the Jewish community. After all, it is they who are most familiar with the Jewish religious tradition and who shape their lives around its commandments.

The theory he propounds isn't an academic construct but personal beliefs: not so much Jewish values as grounded in the Torah, but middle-class values.

Yet the Orthodox enclaves are the only Jewish neighborhoods where Republican candidates get any votes to speak of. Even more telling is that on every single cultural issue, the Orthodox oppose the politically correct liberal positions taken by most other American Jews precisely because these positions conflict with Jewish law. To cite just a few examples: Jewish law permits abortion only to protect the life of the mother; it forbids sex between men; and it prohibits suicide (except when the only alternatives are forced conversion or incest).

Not being much of a Jewish scholar, I can only wonder why Masada isn't condemned by the Orthodox who are otherwise so politically incorrect, and by this conservative who clearly prides himself in being politically incorrect.

The upshot is that in virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.

My Lord (pardon the pun), this man is amazing.

All this applies most fully to Jews who are Jewish only in an ethnic sense. Indeed, many such secular Jews, when asked how they would define "a good Jew," reply that it is equivalent to being a good liberal.

Who defines what it is to be Jewish? And what does this man mean by "ethnic"? Culturally? Certainly not based on national origin, the way Italians or Chinese are ethnic.

As a Jew who moved from left to right more than four decades ago, I have been hoping for many years that my fellow Jews would come to see that in contrast to what was the case in the past, our true friends are now located not among liberals, but among conservatives.

Our true friends?

Of course in speaking of the difference between left and right, or between liberals and conservatives, I have in mind a divide wider than the conflict between Democrats and Republicans and deeper than electoral politics. The great issue between the two political communities is how they feel about the nature of American society. With all exceptions duly noted, I think it fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at this country is injustice and oppression of every kind—economic, social and political. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a nation shaped by a complex of traditions, principles and institutions that has afforded more freedom and, even factoring in periodic economic downturns, more prosperity to more of its citizens than in any society in human history. It follows that what liberals believe needs to be changed or discarded—and apologized for to other nations—is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating and proudly defending against attack.

This is the rub: liberals only want to apologize for how bad the country is, only see the bad, while conservatives see the good, want to preserve it, and extol the great country the US is, the best ever. These are stereotypes, and are inaccurate.

Never mind what people think: not all liberals are critics, and not all conservatives are patriots. Considering the historical record is quite imortant; I'll select civil rights as a starting point.

Despite the Civil War being won by the Union, with its declared intent to end slavery and make citizens of freed Negroes, racial discrimination prevailed for decades, both in social custom and in the law. Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the constitutionality of segregation, further embedding racism into the social fabric.

Negroes petitioned for their rights, but society wasn't interested in granting them. Keeping things as they were, resisting change, was the conservative position. Yet Negroes were not interested in remaining second-class citizens, and over time their demands grew stronger: bus boycott, marches, sit-ins were tactics used to insist on their equality before the law. Some whites sympathized with their plight, considered that it was morally wrong for society to be segregated, morally wrong for black people to be discriminated against, and joined the protests. Those were liberals. Yes, they saw something wrong with society, and considered change important. Racism was unjust. Blacks were oppressed. And liberals worked for change. In doing so, liberals wanted their black brethren to be treated equally, and considered that by changing society the United States would become a better country.

Conservatives opposed change. They saw society as being undermined by the agitation of Negroes and of those liberals who foolishly joined them. They wanted the status quo to prevail. They saw communists in the civil rights movement, and charged that reds were agitating, were riling up Negroes, all to carry out their wicked scheme of destroying American society.

One example, but a telling one. And, not the only example of conservatives opposing change. Women's rights, beginning with the right for to vote, were also opposed by conservatives. It is not that conservatives want to preserve the greatness of American society, to protect it against the dangerous designs of liberals. In opposing change, conservatives oppose

Greenback’s new father

Mathew Brady — Wikipedia: Elbridge G. Spaulding drafted the Legal Tender Act, which let the government print paper money and pay for the Civil War.

Six months after the financial world seemed to be coming to an end, the world’s economies appear to be recovering. Banks that seemed to be on the brink of failure less than a year ago are now able to pay back investments made by the Treasury.

It is too early to declare victory, but the world looks much safer than it did only a few months ago. Credit markets are recovering, to the point that the junk bond market will have its best year ever if it manages not to lose any money over the rest of 2009. The stock market has just finished its best six months since 1938.

If victory is to be had, it will owe a lot to the willingness of American policy makers to set aside cherished policies and simply create money. And that is one reason it is appropriate to pause and celebrate an unheralded bicentennial: The father of the greenback, Elbridge Gerry Spaulding, who was born 200 years ago, in 1809.

Spaulding was that rarest of creatures, a man who succeeded in both business and politics; a congressman who saw a problem coming and had a solution ready. It was he who, at the end of 1861, figured out that the American government simply needed to print money to pay for the Civil War. It was economic heresy then, but without it this country might not have survived.

Today Spaulding is largely forgotten. Civil war generals are remembered with monuments and even colleges; Spaulding has a dormitory named for him at the University of Buffalo.

A dorm?

But some deem him a hero. “If Wall Street had saints, then the college of financial cardinals would surely canonize Elbridge G. Spaulding,” wrote T. J. Stiles in his insightful new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, “The First Tycoon.”

A congressman from Buffalo, and a banker before and after he was a politician, he was chairman of a House Ways and Means subcommittee when the government was in danger of running out of money to pay for the Civil War. He wrote a law that allowed the government to print money and declare it had to be accepted as legal tender.

To opponents, Spaulding’s plan was simply immoral. “It will infinitely damage the national credit,” warned Representative Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, adding that it was “a breach of the public faith” that would lead to rampant inflation.

Wonder what other brilliant nuggets the gentleman from Vermont has to his credit.

Mr. Bernanke’s eventual reputation is likely to be determined by how well he succeeds in his vow to right the economy without prompting a major devaluation of the dollar.

Some doubt he can do it. “The Fed, which saw none of this coming, now asks us to believe that it will see clearly enough into the future to remove this massive monetary stimulus before it becomes harmful,” said James Grant, the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.

Maybe Chairman Ben didn't see the crisis looming, but he sure reacted quickly and forcefully, unlike his predecessor.

If Mr. Bernanke does manage to accomplish that, he, like Elbridge Spaulding, will have earned financial canonization.

In memoriam

Last evening I watched the memorial service for Senator Kennedy. A highlight was a speech by former Iowa Senator John Culver. He told a story of going to Hyannis with his Harvard friend Ted Kennedy. I was in stitches. Senator Orrin Hatch was also funny.

A photo gallery from Daily Beast captures some moments.

a taste of Paine

Who was Paine? Depending on whom you ask, he was ­either an uncompromising free-thinker who made possible the popular embrace of the ­Declaration of Independence, or "a filthy little atheist," as Teddy Roosevelt once ­described him. A seditious subject of the English crown or an honorary French citizen chucked in the Bastille. Or just a fiercely American idealist with too much interest in brandy and democracy and not enough in fashion or personal hygiene.

The painting, a bust circa 1792 by Laurent Dabos of Toulouse, seems to have been lost until only a few years ago, when it surfaced in England. It's a flattering portrait, but—not surprisingly, perhaps—on the back of the canvas an anonymous hand appears to have scribbled something of an insult to Paine.

Paine had enormous power with words, Ms. Vickers says, "a power that he himself probably didn't understand. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington made sure Paine kept writing to rouse public sentiment and support. If Washington thought him ­important, we should, too."

Edward M. Kennedy

Senator Edward M. Kennedy shortly after his cancer diagnosis.

Multimedia

Interactive Graphic
Milestones: Edward M. Kennedy



Photographs Remembering Senator Edward M. Kennedy

Kennedy Family Tree: Three Generations of Politics

Edward M. Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Is Dead at 77 (August 27, 2009)
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, with his wife, Victoria, aboard their sailboat the Mya last year. Mr. Kennedy sailed as much as his health allowed in his last months.


More Photos >










August 27, 2009
After Diagnosis, Determined to Make a ‘Good Ending’
By Mark Leibovich

WASHINGTON — The once-indefatigable Ted Kennedy was in a wheelchair at the end, struggling to speak and sapped of his energy. But from the time his brain cancer was diagnosed 15 months ago, he spoke of having a “good ending for myself,” in whatever time he had left, and by every account, he did.

As recently as a few days ago, Mr. Kennedy was still digging into big bowls of mocha chip and butter crunch ice creams, all smushed together (as he liked it). He and his wife, Vicki, had been watching every James Bond movie and episode of “24” on DVD.

He began each morning with a sacred rite of reading his newspapers, drinking coffee and scratching the bellies of his beloved Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash, on the front porch of his Cape Cod house overlooking Nantucket Sound.

If he was feeling up to it, he would end his evenings with family dinner parties around the same mahogany table where he used to eat lobster with his brothers.

He took phone calls from President Obama, house calls from his priest and — just a few weeks ago — crooned after-dinner duets of “You Are My Sunshine” (with his son Patrick) and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (with Vicki).

“There were a lot of joyous moments at the end,” said Dr. Lawrence C. Horowitz, Mr. Kennedy’s former Senate chief of staff, who oversaw his medical care. “There was a lot of frankness, a lot of hugging, a lot of emotion.”

Obviously, Dr. Horowitz added, there were difficult times. By this spring, according to friends, it was clear that the tumor had not been contained; new treatments proved ineffective and Mr. Kennedy’s comfort became the priority.

But interviews with close friends and family members yield a portrait of a man who in his final months was at peace with the end of his life and grateful for the chance to savor the salty air and the company of loved ones.

Befitting the epic life he led, Mr. Kennedy was the protagonist of a storybook finale from the time of his diagnosis in May 2008. It was infused with a beat-the-clock element: his illness coincided with the debate over health care (“the cause of my life”) and the election of a young president he championed.

Mr. Kennedy raced to complete his legislative work and his memoirs (“I’ve got to get this right for history,” he kept saying), leaned heavily on his faith, enjoyed (or endured) a procession of tributes and testimonials and just recently petitioned Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts to push for a speedy succession so his Senate seat would not be vacant long.

The knowledge that his death was approaching infused Mr. Kennedy’s interactions with special intensity, his friends say.

“He was the only one of the Kennedy boys who had a semi-knowledge that his end was near,” said Mike Barnicle, the former Boston Globe columnist and an old friend who lives nearby on Cape Cod and visited the senator this summer. “There was no gunman in the shadows, just an M.R.I. It was a bad diagnosis, but it allowed for the gift of reflection and some good times.”

Even as Mr. Kennedy’s physical condition worsened over the summer, he still got out of bed every day until Tuesday, when he died in the evening, said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and one of Mr. Kennedy’s closest friends in the Senate.

“I’m still here,” Mr. Kennedy would call colleagues out of the blue to say, as if to refute suggestions to the contrary. “Every day is a gift,” was his mantra to begin conversations, said Peter Meade, a friend who met Mr. Kennedy as a 14-year-old volunteer on Mr. Kennedy’s first Senate campaign.

Some patients given a fatal diagnosis succumb to bitterness and self-pity; others try to cram in everything they have always wanted to do (sky-diving, a trip to China). Mr. Kennedy wanted to project vigor and a determination to keep on going. He chose what he called “prudently aggressive” treatments.

“He always admired people who took risks, like Teddy and Kara did,” Mr. Dodd said, referring to two of Mr. Kennedy’s children, who both beat cancer with bold treatments. And he vowed to work as hard as he could to lead a legislative overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

“He was the irrepressible Ted Kennedy,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, who visited with his longtime colleague last week. “He was determined to get things done, but he also understood he had limitations.”

Mr. Kennedy deputized Dr. Horowitz, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, to research all treatment options before deciding on an intensive regimen of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation — hardly a clear-cut choice with an almost inevitably lethal disease and a patient of Mr. Kennedy’s age. Some physicians assembled at Massachusetts General Hospital considered his tumor inoperable — and measured his likely survival time between six weeks and a few months.

Before he traveled by private plane from Cape Cod to Duke University Medical Center for his surgery in June 2008, Mr. Kennedy made sure to put his affairs in order — his will, his medical directives and even his legislative instructions, family members say.

On the way to the airport, he called two Democratic colleagues: Mr. Dodd, telling him to take over a mental health bill he had been working on, and Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, instructing her to take over a higher education bill he had been shepherding.

“Barbara,” he boomed over the phone, “as if he was at a Red Sox-Orioles baseball game,” Ms. Mikulski said in an interview. Just days after the surgery, Mr. Kennedy began following up with Ms. Mikulski. “He was Coach Ted,” she said.

Mr. Kennedy took no comfort, friends say, in hearing how missed he was in Washington, or how in his absence he had been become something of a “spiritual leader” on issues with which he is identified, like health care. He kept in close touch with his staff and colleagues, and he was engaged in a running conversation with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, on the delicate subject of whether Mr. Kennedy would be available to vote.

Mr. Reid assured him that he would not ever ask him to come to Washington unless his vote was essential. (His disease and treatments made Mr. Kennedy vulnerable to infections, so wading into crowded areas was risky.) When a crucial Medicare provision came up last summer, Mr. Reid asked Mr. Kennedy if he could make it down.

Mr. Kennedy’s family and staff debated the issue until the senator ended it. “I’ll be there,” he said, according to a member of his staff who was involved in the decision. He received a standing ovation when he returned to the Senate floor, and the bill passed easily after he helped break a Republican filibuster.

Vicki Kennedy fiercely guarded her husband’s privacy, but Mr. Kennedy’s illness had an undeniably public component. His setbacks and hospital visits often drew news media attention. After his emotional speech at last summer’s Democratic Convention in Denver, it was disclosed that he had been suffering from kidney stones and had barely been able to get out of his hospital bed a few hours earlier.

He had to memorize the text of his speech because he struggled to see the teleprompter (his surgery had left him with impaired vision). The seizure Mr. Kennedy had at an Inaugural luncheon at the Capitol led his son Patrick to joke that his father was trying to overshadow Mr. Obama on his big day.

Mr. Kerry remembers Mr. Kennedy telling him on the Senate floor in March that he was having trouble preparing for an event he had been extremely excited for — throwing out the first pitch on opening day at Fenway Park.

While Mr. Kennedy typically told people he felt well and vigorous, by spring it was becoming clear that his disease was advancing to where he could not spend his remaining months as he had hoped, helping push a health care plan through the Senate.

He left Washington in May, after nearly a half-century in the capital, and decamped to Cape Cod, where he would contribute what he could to the health care debate via phone and C-Span. He would sail as much as possible, with as little pain and discomfort as his caretakers could manage.

He also told friends that he wanted to take stock of his life and enjoy the gift of his remaining days with the people he loved most.

“I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said repeatedly, friends recalled.

Mr. Dodd, in an interview, said: “At no point was he ever maudlin, ever ‘woe is me.’ I’m confident he had his moments — he wouldn’t be Irish if he didn’t — but in my presence, he always sounded more worried about me than he was about himself.”

Starting in late July, Vicki Kennedy organized near-nightly dinner parties and singalongs at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. The senator was surrounded in the dining room by his crystal sailing trophies and a semiregular cast of family members that included his three children, two stepchildren and four grandchildren. Jean Kennedy Smith, Mr. Kennedy’s sister, had rented a home down the street this summer and became a regular, too. Instead of singing, she would sometimes recite poetry.

Even as Mr. Kennedy became frustrated about his limitations, friends say his spirit never flagged. “This is someone who had a fierce determination to live, but who was not afraid to die,” said Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat and a Kennedy friend whose district includes Cape Cod. “And he was not afraid to have a lot of laughs until he got there.”

In recent years, friends say, Mr. Kennedy had come to lean heavily on his Roman Catholic faith. In eulogizing his mother, Rose Kennedy, in 1995, he spoke of the comfort of religious beliefs. “She sustained us in the saddest times by her faith in God, which was the greatest gift she gave us,” Mr. Kennedy said, his voice stammering.

He attended Mass every day in the year after his mother’s death and continued to attend regularly, often a few times a week.

The Rev. Mark Hession, the priest at the Kennedys’ parish on the Cape, made regular visits to the Kennedy home this summer and held a private family Mass in the living room every Sunday. Even in his final days, Mr. Kennedy led the family in prayer after the death of his sister Eunice on Aug. 11. He died comfortably and in no apparent pain, friends and staff members said.

His children had expected him to hold on longer — Mr. Kennedy’s son Patrick and daughter Kara could not get back to Hyannis Port in time from California and Washington.

But the senator’s condition took a turn Tuesday night and a priest — the Rev. Patrick Tarrant of Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Mass. — was called to his bedside. Mr. Kennedy spent his last hours in prayer, Father Tarrant told a Boston television station, WCVB-TV.

Mr. Kennedy had told friends recently that he was looking forward to a “reunion” with his seven departed siblings, particularly his brothers, whose lives had been cut short.

“When he gets there, he can say ‘I did it, I carried the torch,’ ” Mr. Delahunt said. “ ‘I carried it all the way.’ ”

Walter Cronkite

I watched him for years. CBS News was the one news report I watched. It was simply the best. Cronkite was a trustworthy journalist, the very idea, the model, the paradigm, of a journalist.

LBJ is reported to have said, in the context of Viet Name, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America." He had lost both and the War, as well.










Unsurprisingly, yet still annoyingly, someone at the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece using Cronkite as a weapon to spank the Journal's favorite foil; the Left.

It was fitting that the death of Walter Cronkite should have occasioned tributes more straightforward, more connected to a recognizable reality -- more reportorial (there was everything to tell) -- and more uplifting in tone than that of any celebrity in decades. They were, these evocations of the man, that life's work and the times that bred them, something of a last gift to his fellow citizens. Those stories about his career as a reporter and then a network anchor that came flooding forth unstoppably from former colleagues and friends in the news business on Friday night were more than just reminders of what broadcast journalism once was and is no more in the age of news as entertainment. The band of network news people who paid homage to him over the weekend—who cited his passion for getting the facts, and who described him as "the gold standard"—understood that between the values of his world and theirs lay a great, gaping chasm.

more than just reminders of what broadcast journalism once was and is no more in the age of news as entertainment. Indeed: Edward R. Murrow himself decried the subordinating of news to ratings, the creeping commercialization of network news.

The columnist escapes the clutches of the monsters of the Left long enough to hold up Mike Wallace as a poster boy for the folly of liberals. Eric Sevareid seeing Rudolf Hess in the 1930s (one wonders why the writer could not be a mite more specific) and declining to give the Nazi a platform for propaganda is held up as exemplary behavior.

But it is used only as a setup for another point. To wit:

It was impossible, rereading this [Sevareid's 1946 memoir, "Not So Wild a Dream"] last week, to think of more than a very few journalists today who would make a choice like this, and on such a basis—the well-justified certainty, namely, that the famous subject would only make the same familiar pronouncements. Whom might those select few be? Alas, it is left unsaid. For that is not the point.

This, it hardly needs saying, is a prospect that poses no problems for journalism today, especially the kind on display in Sundays' TV talk-show fests: interviews that require nothing by way of producing news, and from which nobody expects any news—the mere presence of a guest wearing the mantle of newsmaker being quite enough to satisfy all requirements.

Daily fare on Fox News not included? Perchance, why?

No newsmaker, of course, has proved more enticing a catch, or provided less news, while making the round of talk shows than the 21st century's foremost apostle of Nazi-like doctrine, Iran's own Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nazi'like doctrine? Oy vay. Ahmadinejad does espouse ridiculous ideas and policies, perhaps most prominently his denial of the Holocaust. But to call his doctrine Nazi-like is absurd. Nazis put people in concentration camps, then systematically annihilated them.

And, why not a swat at Cronkite himself at the end?

He may not have been, in fact, the most trusted man in America, but he was something more important—a representative. In his bearing, as well as the proofs of a long life, he seemed to speak for the best in the American character. America always sensed that about him and was, rightly, grateful.

Kenneth M. Stampp, Civil War Historian

Kenneth Stampp in 1993.


Kenneth M. Stampp, a leading Civil War historian who redirected the scholarly view of slavery in the antebellum South from that of a benign relationship between white plantation owners and compliant slaves to one of harsh servitude perpetuated to support the South’s agrarian economy, died Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 96.

Mr. Stampp, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1946 to 1983, wrote several influential books about the Civil War period, from the decade leading up to the war to Reconstruction.

His reputation was founded on two books that turned accepted wisdom inside out and engendered seismic shifts in the scholarship of the period. They became staples of university classrooms.

Amazingly, in all the years I've studied the Civil War, and all the meetings I attended at the Round Table, I never heard of him.

The first, in 1956, was “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South,” which juxtaposed the views of slaves themselves with the more conventionally researched perceptions of slave owners, yielding a far different picture of the institution than historians had previously created.

Rather than portraying slaves as docile, simple-minded creatures who were complicit in their own subjugation, Mr. Stampp showed how by working slowly, breaking tools and stealing from their owners, the slaves were in constant rebellion. And rather than portraying the owners as beneficent upholders of a genteel culture determined to maintain racial harmony, Mr. Stampp revealed the slave-keeping impulse to be an economically motivated choice.

Not "yes, massa, I's happy wid you." Or the benevolent white father.


“We now viewed slavery not only through the eyes of the masters but through the eyes of the slaves themselves,” said Leon Litwack, a long-time colleague and former student of Mr. Stampp’s at Berkeley, and the author of “Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. “He was clearly one of the influential historians of the 20th century. All you have to do is open history textbooks and compare what you find in them to what you found before 1960.”

Perhaps the Texas Board of Education should take a look.

The second seminal book, “The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877,” published in 1965, demythologized another favorite trope of previous historians: that the decade after the Civil War was disastrous for the South, a time of vengefulness visited upon it by the North, of rampant corruption and of vindictive political maneuvering.

Yet there are people who do blame Sherman and all Yankees that followed him for wreaking havoc upon the South.

“He was really a pioneer, demolishing the magnolia and mint juleps view of slavery,” said Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia. “And the Reconstruction book was in the same revisionist mode, sweeping away myths. Among serious history scholars, nobody is going to go back before Stampp.”

Impressive.

The Cult of the Caudillo

To understand what is happening in Honduras today, it helps to know a bit more about Latin America’s long love affair with caudillos, how these larger-than-life but power-hungry men damaged their countries, and why so many people are terrified that they are making a comeback.

Acceptable statement, though rather general and sweeping. There is, of course, no denying the reality of the caudillo in Latin American history. Yet it is important to carefully analyze history, and resist the temptation of making shallow analysis.

Caudillismo is so deeply rooted it has spawned its own literary genre. Discerning readers see Fidel Castro as the model for the aging, cow-obsessed strongman in Gabriel García Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” who wanders alone dragging his outsize testicles over the floors of his presidential palace. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in his novel “The Feast of the Goat,” portrayed the precariousness of life in the Dominican Republic under the rule of the predatory and brutal right-wing caudillo, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

My reading of the recent García Márquez biography byGerald Martin informs me differently; the Patriarch may well have been a composite, and in part based on Trujillo. I shall have to clear that up.

In Latin America, the strength of the caudillo weakened the region’s institutions. Political parties centered on caudillos often collapsed after the caudillo’s death and never professionalized. As a result, Latin Americans seem perennially ready to trust their fate to a providential “man on horseback” who comes to their nation’s rescue, rather than on the ability of the nation’s institutions to provide security and prosperity.

My reading of John Lynch's biography of Bolívar left me with the impression that caudillismo prevented the emergence of robust institutions. Rather than a result, people's trust in strongmen was concurrent with weak institutions, corruption, and social divisions.

Caudillos come in all ideological stripes. Mr. Pinochet, whose famous photograph in sinister dark glasses was taken soon after his coup, became the iconic image of the right-wing Latin American military dictator. These days, most caudillos are leftist. Mr. Castro, el Comandante or el Caballo (the Horse), has the dubious distinction of being the longest-lived caudillo in Latin American history, owing his record-breaking stretch in power more to caudillismo than Marxismo. He’s passed on the torch to Hugo Chávez, the populist caudillo from Caracas, Venezuela.

Interestingly, the article is not accompanied by the famed photograph of Pinochet looking thuggish in his dark glasses, but, rather, a more innocuous one of the general as a sort of elder statesman.
In the 20th century, few had bigger egos than Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Known as El Jefe, Mr. Trujillo took power at age 38, wearing a sash with the motto Dios y Trujillo, or “God and Trujillo.” Even churches were forced to emblazon the motto. A few years later, the capital, Santo Domingo, was renamed Ciudad Trujillo. Fond of wearing comic-opera military uniforms with 18th-century-style plumed hats, Mr. Trujillo was as brutal as he was outlandish, murdering thousands of Haitian immigrants as well as torturing and killing political opponents; he fed some of them to the sharks.

Trujillo was the US's man in the Caribbean, a bulwark against communism. His cruelty and brutality is undeniable, yet to omit mention of his being favored by Washington leaves an incomplete, and thus an inaccurate, picture.
While arms made the man in the 19th century, in the 20th, most caudillos have been careful to present themselves as champions of the people, wrapped either in the mantle of revolution—like Fidel Castro—or in that of democracy. Argentina’s Juan Domingo Perón used populism to endear himself to the nation’s poor, known as descamisados, or “shirtless ones.”

Perón returned in the 1970s and held power again, and after his deatch, his new wife held power for a while. Perónismo is the dominant ideological construct, but a vapid skeleton that simply has the label, and little substance. Its meaning is manipulated, so that Menem and the Kirchners can both be labeled Peronists.

The legacy of Mr. Perón’s free-spending populist philosophy has led Argentina into periodic economic crises. When prices for Argentine exports like beef are high, for instance, Perónist governments have spent the windfall like a drunken sailor, leading to a cash crunch when prices eventually head south.

Rather poor choice of metaphor: Argentina is in the South.

As far as the U.S. was concerned, the cause of democracy in Latin America often took a back seat to fighting Communism during the Cold War. For years, the U.S. either looked the other way or supported coups with the aim of preventing the spread of Communism in the hemisphere. Military coups became almost ritual. In the 1970s, Honduras endured so many coups that the capital was jokingly called Tegucigolpe, for the Spanish word golpe, or coup.
Well, the point is raised; I would quibble with the word often. But, the point is made, and is accurate.

While democracy has spread throughout Latin America, caudillos never vanish, they just adapt to changing times. Gone is the old-fashioned military coup, replaced with a new strategy for power that could be called “coup by stealth,” or “coup by democratic means.”


The primary architect of this new blueprint is Mr. Chávez, a strongman with one foot grounded in the past and the other firmly placed in the future of caudillismo. In 1992, Mr. Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel with a mish-mash of leftist, nationalist and fascist ideas, led an old-fashioned coup in an attempt to overthrow the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez. It failed, and Mr. Chávez was jailed.

Declaration of Independence found in British Archives

This item appeared in the current (7/8/2009) American Libraries Direct:

Declaration of Independence found in British Archives
A copy of the American Declaration of Independence has been discovered in Britain. The document, which is in perfect condition, is believed to be one of only 200 printed and was stumbled upon among files at the National Archives in Kew, southwest London, by an American doing research. Printed on July 4, 1776, it brings the total of known surviving copies worldwide to 26. The first official printings of the Declaration are known as Dunlaps because the name of the printer, John Dunlap, is given on each copy. A copy can be downloaded for free from the Archives site....

And I already downloaded a copy.

Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

Robert Patterson

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.

The 1801 letter from Robert Patterson to Thomas Jefferson

To Mr. Patterson's view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, "it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering."

Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race," he wrote.



The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.



The code, Mr. Patterson made clear in his letter, was not a simple substitution cipher. That's when you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. The problem with substitution ciphers is that they can be cracked by using what's termed frequency analysis, or studying the number of times that a particular letter occurs in a message. For instance, the letter "e" is the most common letter in English, so if a code is sufficiently long, whatever letter appears most often is likely a substitute for "e." Because frequency analysis was already well known in the 19th century, cryptographers of the time turned to other techniques. One was called the nomenclator: a catalog of numbers, each standing for a word, syllable, phrase or letter.

But Mr. Patterson had a few more tricks up his sleeve. He wrote the message text vertically, in columns from left to right, using no capital letters or spaces. The writing formed a grid, in this case of about 40 lines of some 60 letters each.

Then, Mr. Patterson broke the grid into sections of up to nine lines, numbering each line in the section from one to nine. In the next step, Mr. Patterson transcribed each numbered line to form a new grid, scrambling the order of the numbered lines within each section. Every section, however, repeated the same jumbled order of lines.

The trick to solving the puzzle, as Mr. Patterson explained in his letter, meant knowing the following: the number of lines in each section, the order in which those lines were transcribed and the number of random letters added to each line.

view interactive

The key to the code consisted of a series of two-digit pairs. The first digit indicated the line number within a section, while the second was the number of letters added to the beginning of that row. For instance, if the key was 58, 71, 33, that meant that Mr. Patterson moved row five to the first line of a section and added eight random letters; then moved row seven to the second line and added one letter, and then moved row three to the third line and added three random letters. Mr. Patterson estimated that the potential combinations to solve the puzzle was "upwards of ninety millions of millions."

Undaunted, Dr. Smithline decided to tackle the cipher by analyzing the probability of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Certain pairs of letters, such as "dx," don't exist in English, while some letters almost always appear next to a certain other letter, such as "u" after "q".

To get a sense of language patterns of the era, Dr. Smithline studied the 80,000 letter-characters contained in Jefferson's State of the Union addresses, and counted the frequency of occurrences of "aa," "ab," "ac," through "zz."

Dr. Smithline then made a series of educated guesses, such as the number of rows per section, which two rows belong next to each other, and the number of random letters inserted into a line.

To help vet his guesses, he turned to a tool not available during the 19th century: a computer algorithm. He used what's called "dynamic programming," which solves large problems by breaking puzzles down into smaller pieces and linking together the solutions.

The overall calculations necessary to solve the puzzle were fewer than 100,000, which Dr. Smithline says would be "tedious in the 19th century, but doable."

After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson's cipher emerged -- 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49. Using that digital key, he was able to unfurl the cipher's text:

"In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..."

That, of course, is the beginning -- with a few liberties taken -- to the Declaration of Independence, written at least in part by Jefferson himself. "Patterson played this little joke on Thomas Jefferson," says Dr. Smithline. "And nobody knew until now."

King of Pop

Quincy Jones on How Jackson Did It

"Off the Wall" and "Thriller" solidified Michael Jackson's status as the "King of Pop." Jim Fusilli talks to Quincy Jones, the producer behind these two recordings.

• Video: Fans Pay Tribute | Photos

Lost events

Kalustyan's, a market at 123 Lexington Avenue, is the only building still standing where a president was sworn in: Chester A. Arthur.

Multimedia

Graphic

A Rescue, A Swearing In, A Close Call

June 30, 2009
A Historian Is on a Quest to Locate Lost Events
By SAM ROBERTS

Forlornly unidentified and altogether forgotten, these sites have been literally lost to history.

On Avenue of the Americas, there is a block where the first cellphone call was completed in 1973; on West 125th Street, where the old Blumstein’s department store stood, nothing marks the place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed in 1958.

Then there is the spot on Fifth Avenue where Winston Churchill, crossing against the light, was struck by a car in 1931 and nearly killed.

And what about the old Winter Garden Theater at 671 Broadway? In 1864, on the very night that Confederate sympathizers singled out the Lafarge Hotel next door in their plot to burn down New York, the Booth brothers — John Wilkes, Junius Brutus Jr. and Edwin — starred in “Julius Caesar.” The benefit performance, which was billed as the brothers’ sole joint engagement, raised $3,500 for the Shakespeare statue that still stands in Central Park.

Andrew Carroll, 39, an amateur historian, is embarking this week on a 50-state journey to uncover, memorialize and preserve these and other sites where history happened serendipitously, and which, for one reason or another, have been relegated to anonymity.

“It’s sort of a reverse scavenger hunt,” he said. “Trying to find things that aren’t there.”

His Here Is Where campaign, in collaboration with National Geographic Traveler, might seem quixotic, but so did two of his earlier efforts that proved to be immensely popular.

In 1993, when he was an English major at Columbia, he founded the American Poetry and Literacy Project with Joseph Brodsky, the nation’s poet laureate. They distributed free poetry books across the country. Five years later, he launched the Legacy Project (warletters.com), a repository for soldiers’ wartime letters and e-mail messages home.

Mr. Carroll’s latest crusade (www.HereIsWhere.org) was inspired by a story he read 15 years ago about a dramatic rescue that occurred during Abraham Lincoln’s first term as president. The president’s son Robert Todd Lincoln was about to board a sleeping car at Exchange Place in Jersey City one night when he fell between the platform and the train as it started to pull out of the station.

“My coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform,” Lincoln recalled years later. “Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name.”

Mr. Carroll hopes to install a marker at the site, now a PATH station.

“We’re all attracted to great stories, and in that way history sells itself,” he said. If history is taught by rote, though, students will tune out, he said. “The more we make history about memorizing names and places and dates we’re going to lose the next generation.”

Those great stories, he said, reveal some of the eternal truths about human nature, humanity’s brutality, heroism, resilience.

“For every John Wilkes Booth,” he said, “there was an Edwin.”

New York is rich in historic sites that have escaped the lore of the city.

Kalustyan’s, the Middle Eastern and Indian food market at 123 Lexington Avenue, at 28th Street, is the only building in the city still standing where a president of the United States was sworn in. (On Sept. 20, 1881, Vice President Chester A. Arthur took the oath at his home there after President James A. Garfield died of gunshot wounds.) A small plaque in the locked vestibule for the apartments upstairs is the only hint of anything historic.

In 1908, baseball’s greatest hit, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” was published by the composer’s company on West 28th Street and made its debut with a performance at the Amphion, an opera house on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. No marker identifies either site.

Mr. Carroll’s exploration will take him to Fairfield, Conn., the home of Ely Parker, an American Indian lawyer who worked with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and was credited with drafting the articles of surrender that Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox. In Baltimore, he plans to visit the site of the shop where Mary Katherine Goddard printed the first copy of the Declaration of Independence that includes all of the signatories.

Mr. Carroll discovered that hotels often have rich histories. He learned, for example, that Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X once worked at the Parker House in Boston.

The Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, Mr. Carroll’s hometown, has agreed to install a marker that commemorates a moment on Nov. 27, 1925, when the poet Vachel Lindsay was timidly approached at dinner by a busboy who placed three poems he had written next to Lindsay’s plate. Lindsay was so impressed that he shared them with his audience at a poetry reading that night, prompting journalists to report on the “busboy poet.” His name was Langston Hughes.

“What Andy’s doing is sensational,” said Keith Bellows, the editor of National Geographic Traveler, “in that he’s peeling back a layer of history to expose Americans where they live and where they travel to things they otherwise might not have been aware of.” Mr. Carroll begins his 50-state expedition with a trip to Maine to explore the sites of the 1855 Portland Rum Riot against Neal S. Dow, the prohibitionist mayor.

“This trip is just the kickoff,” said Mr. Carroll, who is paying for his tour with a book advance. “I’m going to be doing this for life.”