Issue

When the French Revolution broke out 200 years ago this month, Americans greeted it enthusiastically. After all, without the French, we could never have become free. But the cheers faded as the brutality of the convulsion emerged, and Americans realized that they were still only a feeble newborn facing a giant, intimidating world power.

In the years between the dedication of the Statue of Liberty and the First World War, the Divine Sarah was, for hundreds of thousands of Americans, the single most compelling embodiment of the French republic.

Remember the excitement of the 1924 Olympics in Chariots of Fire? That was nothing compared with what the U.S. rugby team did to the French at those games.

The Tin Lizzie carried us into the 20th century, but she gave us a hell of a shaking along the way. Now, a veteran driver tells what everybody knew and nobody bothered to write down.

It cannot be measured in dollars alone. It involved a kind of personal power that no man of affairs will ever have again.