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How Do We Know You’re Not a Communist? The Red Scare that Ripped America Apart

Clay Risen spent six years working on “Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America,” a narrative history of the anti-communist panic that consumed the country in the decade after World War II. Americans, fearing the communist Soviet Union and communism advancing across Asia, grew paranoid. While the threat of Soviet espionage was very real – Soviet spies had infiltrated the Manhattan Project, to build the atomic bomb, for example – but what Joseph McCarthy, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, did in the 1950s was turn mostly old issues into an ongoing hysteria. Thousands of innocent people lost their jobs, books were banned and charges of communist leanings were taken to extremes. Risen will discuss the book at the National Book Festival on Sept. 6.

This conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

Timeless: Part of the impetus for this book actually came from your childhood, when your grandfather, who had worked for the FBI during the Red Scare years, told stories about that work.

Clay Risen: Sure, when I was a kid he’d tell this one story in particular, about a time he was working in Chicago. He got a call from a guy who said, “Hey, you should check out Mr. Gruber, he’s a Nazi.” So he’d go check out Mr. Gruber. And Gruber would say, “A Nazi? That’s ridiculous. I came here as a kid and my son is in the Army, and I have a flag in my store. What you should do is check out Mr. Rosenstein, he’s a communist.” So, my granddad would go see Rosenstein, who would say, “That’s ridiculous. I’m a registered Republican.” Then he interviewed the neighbors, who’d say, “Oh, Gruber and Rosenstein, those guys hate each other. They’ve been at it for years. They’re just trying to get the other one.” It’s a funny story, but what stuck with me was, even before I could articulate it in these terms, was that these guys were using the police power of the state — my grandfather — to go after each other. It was funny at first, but it’s also really scary when you think about it.

Timeless: Everyone remembers Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who rose to fame, or infamy, as the most visible red baiter of the era. Who do we not remember who also played a critical role?

The person who really kicked everything off was J. Parnell Thomas, a U.S. representative from New Jersey. In 1947, he was the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee and began to go after any and all suspicions of communist connections. His biggest target was Hollywood. This is where the famous Hollywood 10 witnesses came and testified, they were all resistant to the committee and they all went to jail. Even then, it was clear that Thomas was grasping at straws, that he was self-promoting, and so he had picked the biggest target: Hollywood.

Also, when you’re looking at the life story of Richard Nixon, you look at the way that he carried himself and the way that he used HUAC to improve his standing? It was pretty masterful. And I don’t think he was completely wrong. He was the driving force in going after Alger Hiss, and he was right about him. [Hiss was a high-ranking State Department official who was charged in 1950 with spying for the Soviet Union during the 1930s. He was convicted of perjury and went to prison but maintained his innocence.] So Nixon is another figure who really helped elevate the Red Scare. Without him, I don’t think the Red Scare, or the campaign of adamant anti-communism in Congress, would’ve had the widespread purchase and legitimacy that it did had Nixon not been there to give it a little polish.

Author Clay Risen. Photo: Kate Milford.

A lot of the communist accusations in the Red Scare of the 1950s really had to do with political groups and actions during the New Deal era of the 1930s, not so much post-World War II espionage, when the Soviet Union was our clear Cold War enemy.

By the 1950s, New Deal progressivism had really lost a lot of its steam. That’s when the backlash set in. In the Red Scare, it was almost like they were pursuing ghosts. The big cases at the time — things like the Alger Hiss case — revolved around things that he was said to have done in the 1930s. No one accused him of being a current spy. Alistair Cooke, the British journalist, wrote a book about the era, “A Generation on Trial: USA v. Alger Hiss,” That that really captured what was going on. So, much of the Red Scare was this kind of delayed reaction from a fight that had had relevance in the 1930s, but almost seemed beside the point in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

A lot of the headlines were about targets in Hollywood, at first screenwriters and then big names on screen.

Yes. And just to underline, these accusations were baseless or based on some set of criteria that really had no place in a democratic society. Things like, “You signed a petition that was circulated by an alleged communist front in 1935.” Or, “You appeared onstage with Paul Robeson, and we all know Paul Robeson [the actor, singer and activist] is a left-wing radical.”

So, there were these self-appointed investigators and lawyers who would go after people who had been smeared or targeted in some way and say, “Come to us with your issue, Hollywood stars, and tell us why you were wrong. Write it all out and if we believe you, we will lobby your case to the executives of Hollywood. But if we don’t believe you, we’re going to tell the executives of Hollywood that you are to be banned forever.”

And they were powerful enough to get scores of letters from names like John Houseman, John Ford and Vincent Price. Lena Horne had a file that was particularly extensive and really kind of mind blowing, but these groups went back and forth between themselves, like, “Is Lena Horne sufficiently sorry for what she did?” It was very much a star chamber.

Was there ever a point at which people said, “OK all that’s over and, wow, that was a terrible thing?”

No, there was never a reckoning. There was never really a moment where the country said, “We need to atone for this.” Or even that everyone recognized that something bad happened. Part of the Red Scare that is different maybe from things like Jim Crow or other periods of injustice in American history is that even to this day, there are a lot of people who think, “Yeah, that was OK,” or “We got a little carried away, but it was justified.” Or they say, “Well, what we did was fine. What McCarthy did was bad.” There’s a lot of that. Harry Truman was, I think maybe an exception. He created an executive order in 1947 that was the first real program for loyalty tests in the federal government. It very quickly got out of hand. Later, he wrote in his memoirs that he essentially said, “I made a huge mistake.”

What was your ultimate takeaway? Is it just a sad chapter in American history or something more ominous?

I think it’s something much more ominous. I think that, look, this is a country founded on the belief that we all have inalienable liberties and that we are all sovereign individuals who delegate certain powers to the government. And so fundamentally, we should hold that as the highest priority. And yet the Red Scare is one example among many, unfortunately, where we very willingly threw that all aside. And it’s not that there wasn’t any justification. The Cold War was real and Soviet espionage was real, but they were used as an excuse to trample on the civil liberties of tens of thousands of Americans. I mean, broadly speaking, millions of people lives were intruded upon by investigators. I don’t think that we really learned our lesson from that.

I think that what the Red Scare indicates is that these things are a recurrent aspect of American political life. The fundamental mechanisms come back time and again, and in a country that depends so much on freedom of speech and the freedom of association — and just the freedom to live your life the way you want — we give that all up so easily. We need to remember that.

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Crazy About Those Martians!

We’re talking today with David Baron, author of “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America,” who will be at this year’s National Book Festival on Sept. 6. It’s about the public fascination with what looked to be the very real possibility of life of Mars. The main cultural artifact of this belief might be H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds,” which imagined hostile Martians invading Earth in spectacular fashion. But as Baron writes, most of the views were utopian, picturing Martians as a far advanced, heroic people. He researched part of the book while holding the 2020-2021 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation, part of the John W. Kluge Center.

This conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

Timeless: The whole fascination with Mars in this era started in the late 1870s. Tell us about that.

David Baron: Yes. In 1877, a year when Mars came especially close to Earth, an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli in Milan decided he was going to make a new map of Mars. Night after night, he was studying the planet through his telescope. Mars turns on its axis about once every 24 hours like Earth, so he could see features come into and rotate out of view. It looked as if Mars had oceans and continents like the Earth. But Schiaparelli noticed what he thought were really thin straight lines that crisscrossed the planet. He assumed they were waterways, like the English channel. He called them “canali,” which in Italian means channels, but it was mistranslated into English as canals. It stuck.

Timeless: The idea of intelligent life and canals on Mars gained steam and by the 1890s, the hero of the book, Percival Lowell, an extremely wealthy, very prominent Bostonian, goes all in on astronomy and Mars.

Baron: Right, Lowell was well-educated, incredibly smart, articulate, famous. His family founded the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, and they were very much involved in Harvard. They were instrumental in creating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For years, Percival, the wealthy son, was a roving anthropologist in Japan and Korea. He wrote books and gave lectures. But in 1892, there was a sort of Mars boom, when some astronomers thought they saw lights and triangles on Mars. This got a lot of attention in newspapers. It was also the era of the gentleman astronomer, and Lowell, who had become fascinated with this, took it to an entirely new level with his wealth. He created the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894, specifically to study Mars. He was convinced that there was life on Mars, and he was going to make a name for himself as the man who proved that Martians existed.

“The Martians” author David Baron will be speaking at the National Book Festival on Sept. 6.

Timeless: Not everybody agreed with the life on Mars idea, but I was surprised at how many serious people did. Alexander Graham Bell thought there was intelligent life there. And then Nikola Tesla got involved in dramatic fashion.

Baron: Tesla was a genius. Tesla was incredibly well known. Tesla was highly respected. And he, after working for so long on the transmission of electricity with wires, got interested in the idea of electrical transmission without wires — wireless. In other words, radio, which is what Guglielmo Marconi was working on, too. In 1899, Tesla went out to Colorado and created an experimental laboratory. He spent the better part of a year studying electrical transmission through the atmosphere and the earth. Again, this is before radio really existed. And one night he was alone in the laboratory, and he started to hear this kind of triplet of clicks. He would hear, click, click, click … click, click, click, repeating like that. He convinced himself it was the Martians. He waited until New Year’s Eve, at the beginning of 1901, and then he announced what he had heard. That just completely took off in the press. It really propelled the Mars mania to new heights.

Timeless: This finally all peaks around 1907 or so.

Baron: Lowell took photographs of Mars through his telescope. They were tiny, about a quarter of an inch, the size of a shirt button, and they were very grainy. You could see that there were features that would come in and out of view as the planet rotated, but he claimed you could actually see the canals, too. Over time, he got slightly better photographs and he convinced himself, and he convinced the public, that they really did prove that the canals were there. By 1907, what started out as a theory that was embraced by the tabloid press was now being taken very seriously by the conservative press. The New York Times was publishing very serious articles about the Martians. The Wall Street Journal said that the biggest news of 1907 was the proof of intelligent life on Mars.

Timeless: And this really resonated all across the culture.

Baron: Oh, yes. The idea of Martians had started out as a fun thing. There were Martians in vaudeville acts and Martians in Tin Pan Alley songs. But by 1908, the Martians were infiltrating religion. You had pastors sermonizing about the Martians as superior beings and what they might be able to teach us. And there was this wonderful article that ran in a number of newspapers, a list of the questions that people thought Martians might be able to answer. They weren’t practical, they were things like, “What is the meaning of life? How can we prevent human suffering? Where does the soul go when we die?” There was this real longing for the Martians, I think, to be a kind of guardian angel, a stand-in for God when religion has been undermined by so much science. Lowell, with his science, had given people back a new kind of faith in superior beings that might be able to look after us in a lonely universe.

David Baron, author “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.” Photo: Dana C. Meyer.

Timeless: And then … it all went wrong. There weren’t canals, and there weren’t Martians.

Baron: In 1909, Mars again came particularly close to Earth, and astronomers trained their better telescopes on it. There was a one-time believer in canals, a prominent astronomer in France named Eugene-Michel Antoniadi, who, on one particularly perfect night of viewing when the air over Paris was absolutely still, saw Mars with perfect clarity. He saw that what he had thought was a canal was just sort of a knotted shape on the landscape, or maybe just some gentle shading. It wasn’t a straight line. Antoniadi convinced himself that the whole thing had been an illusion, and he took it upon himself to bring Lowell down. Though he lived in France, he was head of the Mars section of the British Astronomical Association. From that platform, he wrote to astronomers all over the world, he wrote for newspapers and wrote for magazines, that the whole thing was an illusion.

Timeless: Things did not go well for our hero.

Baron: Lowell would never hear of it. But by then there were other astronomers who had better photographs. And so by 1910, 1911, the astronomical community had pretty well decided that Lowell was wrong. But Lowell continued to promote the idea. He said he saw more and more canals. He would go out on the road and give speeches portraying himself as this misunderstood genius. I think it’s safe to say that Lowell really was delusional at that point. He died in 1916 of a brain hemorrhage, still convinced that the Martian civilization existed.

Timeless: And so what is his legacy today, do you think?

Baron: He gave the public what they loved, which was the idea of a civilization next door. That excitement was real. It was Lowell’s Martians, which never existed, that really spurred what we know today as modern science fiction. And it was more than that. It helped launch the Space Age itself because the early rocket scientists, including Robert H. Goddard, the father of American rocketry, was very explicit that it was as a boy reading “War of the Worlds” that inspired him to think, “Well, gosh, could we actually find a way to go to Mars?” Wernher von Braun first built rockets for the Nazis, but then came to the U.S. and built rockets for NASA. He grew up reading fiction based on Lowell’s Mars that got him excited about the idea of space travel. So, the early rocket scientists were inspired by him, too.

19th-Century Mug Shots: The Face(s) of Counterfeiting

As we mentioned earlier this summer, counterfeiting was a huge problem in the years after the Civil War, when the nation struggled to establish a single paper currency. This led to the creation of the U.S. Secret Service to track down counterfeiters and, in turn, to the agency compiling what we now call mug shots.

The Library acquired more than 1,200 of these from the collection of ace counterfeiting detective Bill Kennoch, and they are a marvelous glimpse at how we lived and looked in days gone by. (These fall into the Library’s Free to Use and Reuse category, as they are copyright free and yours to use in any way you wish.)

Orvill Ball took this wig (or wild combover?) to extremes in this photograph after his arrest for counterfeiting in Scranton, Pennsylvania, between 1865 and 1886. Photo: Sedgwick S. Hull. Prints and Photographs Division.

Since counterfeiting was more fraud than violent crime, almost anyone could play a role in it, from making false bills or coins, distributing them in bulk or just passing them off as legit currency in a dry goods store.

This meant, as evidenced by the photographs, that it was open to young and old, rich and poor, men and women, and any and all races and ethnic groups. Most of these were small-time practitioners of the trade, not the type of outlaw that mobilized manhunts and generated headlines.

The aging Orvill Ball did not achieve any worldly renown before or after being picked up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The back of the card, where agents often scribbled the charges against the accused, only has his name and that of the photographer. Still, for this moment in time, he did cut quite the figure with that head of hair, whether it was all his or not.

Mark Michaelson, the collector and author of “Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots,” a 2006 photo book, described these sorts of small timers to the New York Times this way:

“I started to figure out I wasn’t interested in famous criminals or people who’d committed big crimes or very violent crimes. I wanted the small-time people, petty crooks who just fell through the cracks. Instead of being the most wanted, these were the least wanted.”

The Kennoch collection photographs of these least (or somewhat) wanted cover a range about 30 years, from roughly 1860 to 1890, an era when modern criminology was in its infancy. Police around the world had dabbled in using photographs in crime investigations since the 1840s, but it was a French police official, Alphonse Bertillon, who formalized the mug shot in Paris in the early 1880s.

John Duffy was arrested in Philadelphia for counterfeiting in the late 19th century. Like many a portrait subject, he blinked when the shutter snapped. Photo: Charles H. Spieler. Prints and Photographs Division.

Bertillon used one shot of the suspect facing the camera, the second in profile, and attached these images to a sheet of information about the suspect, most notably several physical measurements that were meant to augment identification. The fingerprint eclipsed most of the other physical measurements a few decades later, leading to the standards still in use today.

The U.S. Secret Service, though, had no standard police cameras. Instead, agents hustled the accused over to the nearest portrait photography studio, where they sat for photos that were usually for cartes de visite, or society calling cards. Such a photograph would have otherwise been a special occasion, if not for the fact that many of the sitters were headed to prison.

So, who among us cannot sympathize with the accused John Duffy? He was arrested in Philadelphia,  walked over to have his picture taken … only to blissfully close his eyes, as if he’d just dozed off, when the camera snapped his picture. The man seems peaceful and serene, even while getting booked.

Nickolas E. Cooper of Bay City, Michigan, was booked for counterfeiting coins. Police said he was violent and dangerous. Photo: Miller Bros. Prints and Photographs Division.

Not everyone seemed harmless. Nickolas E. Cooper was picked up in Michigan for counterfeiting coins. Police started tracking him in Bay City, but only caught up with him in Detroit. Things got ugly. From the brief narrative on the back of the photo: “Went violently insane put into Lunatic Asylum at Pontiac, Michigan. Doctor states that the man is not crazy, only playing it.”

Those eyes, though. They have a glint. It’s the kind of thing you remember, even a century and a half later.

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L’Enfant’s D.C. Blueprint Still Shapes Modern Washington

In 1791, President George Washington entrusted French-born American architect and civil engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant with designing a plan for the nation’s capital, giving him a blank canvas to lay the foundation for modern Washington.

A fragile map documenting this plan, drawn by L’Enfant in 1791 and carefully preserved at the Library, is considered a vital piece of American urban history.

Inspired by the cities of Paris and Versailles, L’Enfant added many intricate details to the city’s grid, placing the Capitol at the center, with major avenues radiating outward like spokes on a wheel.

The map reflects his vision of a city of broad avenues, open public squares, low skylines and tree-lined streets named after states, creating a visual reminder of national unity.

L’Enfant included an expansive promenade stretching west from the “Congress house” — today’s Capitol building — toward the Potomac River, labeling it a “Grand Avenue” for both leisure and civic gatherings, a precursor to what became known over time as the National Mall. He placed the White House — labeled “President’s house” — on elevated land northwest of the Capitol, cleverly connecting the executive and legislative branches of government with what’s now Pennsylvania Avenue.

L’Enfant added open squares and circles, such as Dupont Circle, Logan Circle and Judiciary Square, meant to showcase monuments, public buildings and walkable green spaces. Many of them remain today. Other, lesser-known details draw attention to the original working draft. As early as 1796, when Washington transferred the map to commissioners overseeing a survey of the district, he noted that Thomas Jefferson’s penciled instructions to the engraver on the map were difficult to read.

Then there’s the signature: L’Enfant signed his work as Peter Charles L’Enfant, not Pierre, to reflect his adopted American identity after serving in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. His anglicized name also appears in other historical documents, likely a nod to American loyalty and embracing his role in the young nation.

The map changed hands and locations over many years and suffered decades of deterioration due to heavy use and poor storage conditions, as evidenced by its brittle condition, darkened areas and faded ink. After numerous accounts of its poor condition, the map was transferred to the Library in 1918 for safekeeping. It underwent conservation efforts in 1951, and again in 1991, leaning on modern technology to reveal more information.

Frustrated with L’Enfant’s continued delay in submitting a plan to an engraver, an essential step to promote the new location of the nation’s capital, Washington removed him from the project in 1792. L’Enfant died a poor man, never witnessing how the city fully grew into his vision.

His enduring legacy, however, is a blueprint that fused beauty with power for lasting symbolic and historical impact. Even with modern updates over time, traffic circles, public squares and other open gathering spaces are a reminder of L’Enfant’s vision for D.C. as a European-style capital. Just don’t blame him for the rush-hour traffic jams commuters endure.

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Preserving the Sounds of World War II

Colin Hochstetler is a graduate student pursuing music at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is a junior fellow with the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center’s Recorded Sound Research Center. The interview was conducted by Sahar Kazmi for the Library’s Gazette newsletter.

Tell us a little about your project.

The Office of War Information Collection Lacquer Processing project is one that traces its roots all the way back to the end of the Second World War. OWI was a government organization during the 1940s. They recorded wartime news and American propaganda onto 16-inch discs which were then broadcast domestically and overseas. The Library acquired these discs — tens of thousands of them — around the end of the war and has been working to preserve them ever since. (The complete OWI records are at the National Archives.) My task is to process recordings that came from the OWI’s office in San Francisco. These recordings targeted populations in the Asia-Pacific region and are in languages like Malay, Dutch, Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Burmese, Korean, Japanese, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

As I process discs, the metadata I create is uploaded to the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center’s collections management system, making them discoverable to staff and on-site researchers for the first time.

I am currently in the process of compiling everything I have learned from my work and collection-oriented research into a single document so that processing can continue when my fellowship concludes.

Describe a typical day.

My day tends to be a combination of conducting research, completing processing tasks and receiving special training in all things recorded sound with my NAVCC co-fellow and good friend Joseph Sioui. My supervisor, Dave Lewis, believes it is important for us to branch out beyond our particular projects and learn how sound archives function in general, so each day offers something new and special. It could be shadowing a sound engineer, learning how to handle and store historical recording formats, cleaning discs or touring vaults and labs.

Even if I spend most of a day processing, I never know what sort of disc oddities might pop up and complicate my workflow. Processing is never a straightforward task!

What have you discovered of special interest?

I’ve learned that I absolutely love researching institutional history. I was able to sift through OWI acquisition files and discover a plethora of information not only about where these discs came from and how and when they moved, but also gaps in the collection’s history.

Sharing conversations with staff at NAVCC and the Recorded Sound Research Center has taught me a lot about how institutional knowledge can ebb and flow with different people in different times. My process of working with OWI discs has changed as I have learned more about the collection’s history.

What attracted you to the Junior Fellows Program?

The program stood out as a project-based experience that would allow me — encourage me, actually — to combine my interests in research and library work. As a training musicologist, I was particularly drawn to the projects hosted by NAVCC. I am immensely grateful to have the opportunity to work in the largest sound archive in the country.

What has your experience been like so far?

Working for the Library has been one of the best experiences of my early career. I am one of two junior fellows who have the privilege to work on-site at NAVCC. The facility is beautiful, the people are some of the kindest I have ever met and the mentorship is extraordinary. My experience goes beyond this facility, however, as I have been encouraged to travel to Washington, D.C., and explore other areas of the Library when time allows.

A definitive highlight from my various trips to the city has been getting to know staff at the American Folklife Center. I’m an accordionist, and I play lots of polka, so it was a treat to get to know folklife specialist Jennifer Cutting, who also plays. She even let me play one of her button boxes! I also serendipitously had the opportunity to collaborate with reference librarian Andrea Decker, who translated one of the OWI recordings in Malay for my display day presentation. All in all, my experience at the Library has reaffirmed my love for research and archives in ways I never could have anticipated. I have learned so much from so many kind, skilled and enthusiastic individuals.

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Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Ethicist,” Will See You Now

The ethicist will see you now. You had questions?

“My stepdad has Alzheimer’s. Can my mom date someone else?”

“My boyfriend says he’d save our cat but not a stranger if both were drowning. Is that wrong?”

“My mother-in-law hasn’t saved for retirement. Are we on the hook?”

These were the three questions a packed crowd at an engaging Live! At the Library event last week picked to see what Kwame Anthony Appiah — author of The Ethicist column for the New York Times Magazine and 2024 winner of the Library’s John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity — would have to say. (The hourlong discussion is surprisingly funny.)

The audience-participation evening was a treat, as Appiah, 71, has spent a lifetime cultivating an international perspective on philosophical issues as they relate to ethics, linguistics, nationality and race. He’s written more than a dozen books and is the Silver professor of philosophy and law at New York University. Raised mostly in his father’s native Ghana and educated at Cambridge University in his mother’s native England, he has for decades enjoyed a reputation as one of the world’s foremost thinkers.

“I think about the role of philosophers in our society in terms of giving people tools to thinking about their lives,” Appiah told the crowd in the Coolidge Auditorium. “It’s very definitely not about telling people what to do. That’s not my view of what philosophers are for. Everybody’s in charge of their own life. Everybody has to figure out how to live their life. And it’s a hard job. It’s good to have some help.”

So, that mom who wants to go out dating, even though her children are mortified, particularly by the fact the man she wants to date seems to be a problematic loser? The audience, before hearing Appiah’s advice, could pick between three answers: “No, this would be a betrayal;” “Yes, her dating should not be your concern;” and “Yes, it’s morally acceptable to date. But, yikes, this guy calls for an intervention!”

Kwame Anthony Appiah talks with Roswell Encina, the Library’s chief communications officer, during the Live! At the Library event. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Appiah agreed with the 55% who voted for the third option. The spousal obligations to care for the incapacitated partner continues, he said, but not to the extent to prevent them from having an intimate relationship. The second part of the question — the character of mom’s love interest — was tricky, too.

“Just as children are not very grateful usually when their parents tell them that they’ve got the wrong partners, parents are often not very grateful when their children tell them they’ve got the wrong partners,” he said. This drew a huge laugh.

His best advice: “It’s fine to tell your parents — because you love them — you think they’re making a mistake … but if you’ve sort of tried and they don’t take it, you’re just going to have to accept that it is still their life.”

The answers to the other questions followed the same reasoned logic, while still recognizing life’s inherent pains and difficulties.

Save the cat or the stranger?

The human life is ultimately more important than the cat’s, though all life is valuable. People have more widely interconnected lives and responsibilities to others, Appiah reasoned. (Plus, a reality check: Would the cat-loving boyfriend actually watch a person drown while swimming to his cat?)

Mother-in-law who won’t save for retirement?

Exactly 70% of the audience voted for this answer: “… you have at least a responsibility to help in a limited way.”

Appiah concurred, saying that perhaps the best advice is to offer to pay for the parent to see a professional financial adviser, so that the interpersonal dynamics are removed.

“If she does end up needing some help,” he said, “you should at least be willing to offer it.”

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Is That a Giant Fish? The “Roadside America” of John Margolies

—This is a guest post by Zoe Herrera, an intern in the Office of Communications. It also appears in the July-August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

What would you have found along American roadways in the latter half of the 20th century? The answer lies in Roadside America, a collection of more than 11,000 photographs that captures the unique, odd and one-of-a-kind commercial structures that lined the country’s main streets, byways and highways in that era.

Photographed by architectural historian John Margolies over a span of almost 40 years, from 1969 to 2008, the Roadside America collection provides insight into a wonderfully kitschy bit of Americana that has largely gone by the wayside. (A StoryMap offers a look at the truly impressive range of the country he stopped in and photographed.)

Margolies became interested in roadside attractions as a child growing up in Connecticut in the 1940s and ’50s. As an adult in the mid 1970s, he began crisscrossing America on extended road trips, photographing what he saw: colossal replicas of dinosaurs in Utah and Colorado, grand casinos in Atlantic City, restaurants shaped like giant fish and steamboats.

Texaco gas pumps in Milford, Illinois, in 1977. Photo: John Margolies. Prints and Photographs Division.

This wasn’t just kitsch, he felt, it was a genuine part of American culture and an expression of the national identity. He was concerned that modernism and growing corporate influences were erasing the delightfully idiosyncratic bit of advertising and local color. In 1978, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for this work.

He liked to shoot first thing in the morning, with clear blues skies overhead. “I love the light at that time of day; it’s like golden syrup,” he wrote in “Roadside America,” a 2010 photo book that includes many of his favorite images. “Everything is fresh and no one is there to bother you.”

The Library’s collection, most of which was acquired in 2015, consists of nine categories, encapsulating different types of structures, scenes and travel-related items.

The Trail Drive-in Theater in San Antonio, Texas, in 1982. Photo: John Margolies. Prints and Photographs Division.

“Signs and Billboards,” for example, showcases advertising, from giant neon signs to oversized pizzas and toy rockets. “Miniature Golf” displays the playful designs of the era’s courses: Young golfers could putt their way through and around obstacles of whales, cows, coyotes, houses and windmills and, at one Pennsylvania course, into the base of the Statue of Liberty and out the other side.

As the “Restaurants and Bars” category demonstrates, entrepreneurs were willing to try any gimmick to lure hungry travelers from the road — like the place in New Jersey that erected a leaning Tower of Pizza or the Texas seafood joint that topped its sign with a giant shrimp wearing a cowboy hat and carrying six-shooters.

You couldn’t miss the Christie’s Restaurant sign in Houston, Texas, in 1983. Photo: John Margolies. Prints and Photographs Division.

Margolies put all this into several photo books, mostly in the 1980s and ’90s, including “The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America,” “Home Away From Home: Motels in America” and “Pump and Circumstance: Glory Days of the Gas Station.”

He died in 2016 at age 76. The places he spent much of his life photographing were symbolic of an ever-expanding and increasingly prosperous and mobile country — and the joy Americans found in hitting the road and exploring it all.

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Antrim’s Mexican Journey, a 19th-century Time Capsule

—This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It also appears in the July-August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. In February 1849, a year after the end of the Mexican War, amateur American artist Benajah Jay Antrim embarked by sea from Philadelphia with a small company of men to explore employment and business opportunities in California.

Their route took them on a guided trek by packhorse across Mexico, passing through plains and rich agricultural valleys, rocky mountain passes, small towns and grand cities. Antrim recorded the journey in three diaries and two sketchbooks that trace his experience at sea and then camping and moving overland from Tampico via San Luis Potosí and Guadalajara, ending in April at Mazatlán with his first sighting of the Pacific Ocean.

Antrim was impressed by the natural landscapes and built environments, architecture, design, feats of engineering and infrastructure, and he sketched as often as he could. He found geology, stones and minerals intriguing and wrote of crops, trees and the types of foods available in local markets. He observed class differences and noted the varied receptiveness of people to Americans that his group encountered. He saw poverty as well as prosperity and experienced the social authority of the Mexican military and the Catholic Church.

Antrim drew grand views of the changing and often epic geography. He also captured the intricacies of Spanish colonial architecture, cathedrals, government buildings, plazas, parks, haciendas and city landscape design.

Antrim titled this sketch, “Village of Cerauso looking North to singular Mountain.” Manuscript Division. 

The result was an illustrated travelogue, a kind of time capsule that captured relatively undeveloped parts of rural Mexico as he witnessed them in midcentury and many edifices that remain destinations for tourists and religious pilgrims today.

Antrim went on to make a living as a daguerreotypist in California and Hawaii before returning to the Eastern United States for the remainder of his life.

A finding aid to the Antrim journals and sketchbooks is available online with links to the digital content on the Library’s website. In February 2025, transcriptions created by volunteers were added to the digital presentation by the Library’s By the People crowdsourcing transcription program.

Reaching the west coast, Antrim sketched the ocean. “Our first view of the Pacific Ocean at Mazattan looking S West.” Manuscript Division.

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“Amazing Grace” Didn’t Stand out as “Amazing” When First Published

-This is a guest post by Sahar Kazmi, a public affairs specialist in the Office of the Chief Information Officer. It also appears in the July-August edition of the Library of Congress Magazine.

There’s a famous bit of country music lore that says Dolly Parton wrote two of her biggest hits, “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” on the same night.

The story may not be perfectly true (Parton has said she might have written the songs a few days apart, though they were first recorded on the same cassette), but it’s stuck around in pop culture mythology for years. There’s something almost mystical about the idea that two such celebrated works could share a single point of origin. The stars don’t often align so perfectly. But rare is a Library specialty.

Centuries ago, in the village of Olney, England, the Rev. John Newton and poet William Cowper produced two iconic cultural artifacts for a single collection, the “Olney Hymns” of 1779.

The hymnal’s best-known work, the beloved “Amazing Grace,” is one of the most-recorded songs in history. It didn’t particularly stand out at the time of publication, though — it’s not called “Amazing Grace,” just numbered “Hymn 41” and begins at the bottom of page 53 (in viewing the Library’s digital version, this is image 94). The hymnbook was huge, running to three volumes and more than 450 pages, containing 280 hymns by Newton and 68 by Cowper.

Newton wrote in the preface that the pieces should be simple, for the common folk, and not strain to the reach the heights of poetry. “They should be hymns, not odes, if designed for public worship and for the use of plain people,” he wrote. “Perspicuity, simplicity and ease, should be chiefly attended to; and the imagery and coloring of poetry, if admitted at all, should indulged very sparingly and with great judgment.”

In the book’s layout, “Grace” is the first entry in a group of songs listed under the biblical book of I Chronicles. Under “Hymn 41,” a subheading says that the hymn relates to Chapter 17, verses 16 and 17, and is about “Faith’s review and expectation.”

“Amazing Grace” was just called “Hymn XLI,” when first published in “Olney Hymns.” XLI is the Roman numeral for 41. Music Division.

Newton, once a self-described infidel and libertine, wrote it after a life of near-miss accidents — a horse-riding injury, a deadly storm at sea, a stroke — drew him to faith and ministry. In the hymn, modern readers will notice the elongated letter “s,” which looks like a modern “f,” but still be able to easily read the famous first lines:

Amazing Grace! (how sweet the sound)

That sav’d a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

His friend, Cowper, sought religion through his own trials. His hymn “Light Shining Out of Darkness” coined the well-known maxim, “God moves in mysterious ways.” Although he’d published multiple texts and earned acclaim, Cowper suffered from severe depression and made multiple attempts on his own life.

Cowper’s handwritten note in the first, blank pages of the Library’s copy of “Olney Hymns,” give the book a personal touch. It describes a coachman’s refusal to drive Cowper to the Thames River, in which he’d planned to drown himself.

Cowper’s handwritten note in the first pages of “Olney Hymns,” including his famous line at the end: “God moves in a mysterious way.” Music Division.

Cowper later referred to the incident with a version of the line that is today paraphrased to explain all kinds of uncertainty and distress: “God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.”

Maybe it was just chance that saved Cowper’s life that day. Or maybe there’s a bit of providence somewhere behind the enduring power of the “Olney Hymns.”

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Hang Onto That Cliff! Kay Aldridge, “The Serial Queen”

Return with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when Saturday afternoon movie matinees had an action-packed serial just before the main feature, and none other than Kay Aldridge was The Serial Queen!

There she was in 1942, the cover girl and model, one of the “most photographed girls in the world,” kicking and clawing in “Perils of Nyoka”! And the next year in “Daredevils of the West,” horseback ridin’ and rifle shootin’!

“Millions of hysterically screaming kids in 11,000 U.S. movie theaters greet Republic’s cliff-hanging serials with cheers for the lady whose life hangs in the balance,” said one newspaper column at the peak of her fame. “Kay Aldridge, tall, willowy, with a placidly beautiful face …”

Aldridge, who died at age 77 in 1995 as a much-loved figure in Camden, Maine, the small coastal town where she had settled and went by her married name of Kay Tucker, may be mostly forgotten now. But the Library preserves a unique take of her life in “Memoirs of a Southern Belle,” a scrapbook/pictorial biography by her daughter, Carey Cameron Ferrero.

Six models from the Powers Agency in New York were selected to go to Hollywood to appear in “Vogues of 1938.” Kay Aldridge, second from the right, would go on to appear in 25 films, including three popular serials. Photo: Courtesy of Carey Cameron Ferrero.

Going through her mom’s house after the funeral, Ferrero writes that she found “several dusty cardboard boxes” of her mother’s “brief but splashy career as a model, cover girl and actress.” Inside were a jumble of magazine covers, movie stills, family photos, diaries, fan letters (many containing marriage proposals), newspaper clippings and the like.

Aldridge had never been shy about anything — an affectionate editorial in The Camden Herald after her death noted her “lack of bashfulness for the center stage” — but many of the images and anecdotes were new to her daughter. Many of them had been in scrapbooks that had fallen apart years ago, but were now scattered in no real order.

Ferrero realized that, if she assembled the material into a narrative, it would tell the story of her mother’s “9-year career and its lifelong consequences.”

“The images — some spectacular, others charming, others embarrassing, the majority of them emblematic of American popular culture before and during World War II — compelled me to want to examine the contents of every one of the boxes,” she wrote in the foreword.

The result is an engaging story of a young woman who made it from difficult childhood circumstances in rural Virginia (her father died when she was 5) to almost instant fame by the time she was 19. A relative arranged for her to walk into the fancy Powers Agency in New York and ask for a modeling job — and she was shooting an ad that afternoon to run in Vogue magazine.

Kay Aldridge on the cover of LIFE magazine, then one of the most popular in the country, in 1939. Photo: Courtesy of Carey Cameron Ferrero.

Many of the personal items in the scrapbook have a touching immediacy, like her diary entry of March 1, 1937, the day she signed her first movie contract. She was 19 years old and on her own in Hollywood: “I am thrilled and frightened,” she wrote. “I feel that the course of my life is changing. I am a scared little girl tonight.”

Success blew in — she was on at least 44 magazine covers and in 25 films in nine years. She hung out with stars like Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda and was featured on radio shows and in newspaper profiles. You’d see her on the cover of major national publications such as Life, Look, Redbook and Collier’s. She was the smiling girl in ads for Chrysler cars, Jergens skincare and any number of cigarettes — Camel, Chesterfield, Raleigh, Lucky Strike. You’d also see her in newspaper ads for long-forgotten products such as WILDROOT Hair Tonic and Dr. Lyon’s Tooth Powder.

But that quick success was also one of her Hollywood limitations, she told an interviewer years later. She was so young, so green, and scarcely had time for acting lessons before finding herself in small film roles. Since she was a star model, she didn’t take those little roles seriously and squandered opportunities, she said.

“I always wanted to do light romantic comedy,” she told Merrill T. McCord, author of the 1979 short biography, “Perils of Kay Aldridge: Life of the Serial Queen.” “I was always, I felt, miscast as this superior Eastern society type girl and haughty. Since I couldn’t act and it (the role) wasn’t natural to my personality, it was like casting me across the grain. … I think my career was handicapped by the overemphasis on how photogenic I was supposed to be.”

Dropped from her contract, she took the lesser role of starring in a serial, “Perils of Nyoka,” by Republic Pictures. The 12-chapter story, with one episode coming out each week to draw kids back to the cinema, was popular. It paid good money and was notable because featured as actress as the headliner. She committed to the bit, drawing headlines for doing many of her own action sequences and getting bruises in the process.

Aldridge was on the cover of at least 44 magazine in her 9-year career, with many during World War II. Photo: Courtesy of Carey Cameron Ferrero.

The trailer for her next serial, “Daredevils of the West,” billed her as “The Serial Queen” and promised “12 EPISODES OF … PUNCH-PACKED, HAIR-RAISING, THRILL-CRAMMED ACTION!” (On screen, the exclamation point is an arrow, of the type that keeps getting shot at our heroine.)

Serials faded into the Hollywood sunset after the 1950s, though they would remain popular with film buffs and in the memories of children of the era. Filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg modeled their hugely popular “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movies on the serials they loved as kids.

Aldridge married Richard Tucker, her second husband, in the 1950s. He had a second home in Camden, Maine. She remained there after his death in the late 1970s and became a fixture in town. Photo: Courtesy of Carey Cameron Ferrero.

After three serials, Aldridge married a wealthy man (she had been supporting most of her family, and this was apparently something of a career goal) and left Hollywood at 28. She never went back to acting.

Over the years, there were three marriages, kids and a happy second act as a much-admired hostess and life of the party in Camden, a little town on Penobscot Bay. She attended the occasional film festival, delighting fans, often as excited as they were.

“Camden will not be quite same without Kay Tucker,” wrote Bill Patten, publisher of The Camden Herald, in an op-ed on Jan. 19, 1995, shortly after her death. “… what an extraordinary asset she had become to this community … she had become a local institution.”

It’s always the good picture that has a happy ending.

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