Protection of property by the Declaration of Independence - 25 August 1989

No other country that I know of keeps such an alert watch on anniversaries as America.

Rarely a week goes by that some long-forgotten event, person, accident, isn't dredged up from the files of the newspapers and the memories of the ageing and set out in the papers and on television as a big feature.

I first became aware of this in the early '50s when I was hired as what was variously known in those days as a television MC, host, moderator, even – a word I'm happy to say that died – conferencier. Host, then, for the first 90-minute network show on American television.

Our aim was to present each week a sort of vaudeville show of the arts and sciences and almost from the beginning we took in everything from how the brain works to how an opera is written, from Beethoven's notebooks to the birth of a bee.

In those days there was no taping, everything was live – however dead the material. As you can imagine, even the most diligent, clock-watching producer could never know whether the play would stretch or the neurologist's little demonstration would run short. Well, if there are left today any veterans of live television, they will remember with a wince that nothing ever ran exactly on time. But our show had to end at precisely 89 minutes and 30 seconds.

Well, time and again in performance, an item early in the programme ran short and it would be obvious that somewhere along the line, somebody – me – was going to have to fill in with something. And this is where our producer came in with his zest for anniversaries.

One time, about halfway through the programme, in the middle of a commercial break, he came at me with a fawning smile and a glittering eye.

"What", he said, "do you know about diamonds"?

"If there's one thing", I said, "I know less about than the chemical composition of the planet Neptune, it is diamonds". "Fine!" he said, "Here's a box!"

Back somewhere in the clutter of the props department, he'd found a box of jewels. World famous, I was told, diamonds – The Hope Diamond, the Sancy, the Orlov, the Koh-i-Noor. They were, I should explain, glass copies.

"Well", said the producer, "you'll notice that on the inside lid of the box are these little printed essays about the history of each gem. We need about four minutes and I suggest you come on right after we switch from the Cyclotron at Columbia and go into the film on Lincoln's funeral."

"What", I begged, "is the point?"

"Well", he said, "it just happens to be the 100th anniversary of Queen Victoria's Durbar in India when they presented her with this fabulous diamond". He developed a shifty look which vanished after he'd taken a sneaky look at the inside lid. "The, er... Koh-i-Noor, of course", he said, "originally 191 carats and so forth.

"The idea is", he said, "you start out recalling this happy anniversary and then the camera will zoom in on your hand holding one of the diamonds. The other hand will be ready with the next one and you'll be reading, off camera, from the little essays."

Well it happened. The critics thought it was one of the better features of that programme and everybody was impressed by my graphic and expert histories of each piece I held between thumb and finger while the camera moved in a small arc catching the dazzling facets.

The Koh-i-Noor was the star piece and I went on about the annexation of India, the arrival of the Queen, how she felt the gem didn't have what she called "enough fire" and outrageously had it re-cut from 191 carats to 108.93. I noticed a date on the inset card but said nothing about it till the show was over. Then I buttonholed the producer.

"Look!" I said. "That Durbar, the gift to the Queen, was in 1850 not 1854!"

"Well", he said, "who's to know? At least we caught the 104th anniversary!"

And from then on, this barefaced man would dream up anniversaries – the 62nd anniversary of the first income tax. And nobody ever minded. And today, rarely a night goes by that some television producer doesn't put on the 20th anniversary, the 15th, the 10th, the 40th, of the death of this idol, the capture of that town, the invasion of that country.

There's a monthly magazine here which publishes nothing but memories – pieces and pictures devoted to the events, the personalities, the showbusiness idols of a given year . One month it will be 1967, the next 1952 and so on.

Well, this year, especially the months of August and September, have provided the irresistible coincidence of the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War and the 50th anniversary of the Second. So, one magazine I'm fingering has a cover story on how the 19th-Century world was, I quote, "shattered forever" in 1914, and the cover story on another magazine has "World War II. When darkness fell".

The lead sentence of the story quotes itself, "World War II began last Friday, September 1st, when a German bombing plane dropped a projectile on Puck, a fishing village and airbase in the armpit of the Hel Peninsula". And then it goes on to declare, "That sentence, appearing 50 years ago in this magazine, reported the start of a cataclysm that would ultimately sweep across five continents and change the world forever".

I suppose it's a good thing that young people should know of the events that changed the world forever, though what that can mean to someone who wasn't alive before the change, I have no idea. And, I suspect, that we don't really know any single event that changes anything forever. But this business of commemorating something that happened 25, 50,100 years ago, I think is really only another way of doing what historians do – dividing history up neatly into periods and decades in order, for their own sanity, to impose an order on the world that the world has never had.

Can't you see, 25 years from now, a magazine cover story hailing an historic change in the world, in the world's history and showing a picture of the square in Beijing – assuming, that is, by that time it's agreed that the student massacre changed the face of Asian Communism forever.

I don't know. I was a small, but thoroughly conscious, boy building sandcastles the day the First World War broke out. I can't remember where I was on 3 September 1939. Probably surf-casting for striped bass. But I do remember very vividly the day that, for me, gave the first hint that the world was about to change forever. And it came back to me like the sudden tolling of a bell, this past Thursday, 24 August.

I was, in 1939, on that day, by a freakish coincidence in London – London, Ohio, a small, Midwestern town, on my way back from a long drive out west. We got up on a brilliant hot morning and walked down the street from our autocabin – no motels then – and into the local coffee shop feeling fresh and fine and, I recall, ordering the eggs over easy and the sausage patties and a stack of dollar-size pancakes, and while the man was flipping them over on the griddle, a bulky farmer came in, obviously a friend of the cook, owner.

"Well, well, Leroy", he said, "I guess the jig is up!" "How's that?" the cook said.

"The Nazis", he said, "has gone and cosied up to the Russians."

The cook held a pancake poised on his spatula. My wife and I turned and glared, partly amused, partly contemptuous at this bonehead of a farmer. He moved to the counter and he threw down the local paper, the London Bugle or some such. Black and blaring across the front page was the banner headline, "Hitler signs peace pact with Stalin".

It was, indeed, the day after the signing of the non-aggression pact between Ribbentrop and Molotov. I think it was the news thunderbolt of my lifetime. The most preposterous, undreamed of alliance and we knew then that the Second War was inevitable and coming soon.

Well, to anyone who was not alive to know any of this and has learned little of it since, I believe that the first speech of the new Prime Minister of Poland last Thursday could be one of those decisive turns in history.

And to me, the incredible phrase is the one in which he spoke about forming new economic organisations in the direction of the reform of the system of property. Now that's not terribly eloquent, it's not Churchillian, but the emergence of the word "property" in a Communist charter surely marks an astonishing event in the 72-year-old history of European Communism.

You know that when Thomas Jefferson was composing the Declaration of Independence there was a wrangle among the five of them assigned to write it, over what – exactly – were the unalienable rights with which their creator had endowed them?

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Or should it be "life, liberty and the protection of property"? Well, they let "happiness" stand, but when the men who wrote the Constitution went home, many of them wrote into their state Constitutions a phrase that stands, "Life, liberty and the acquisition and protection of property".

This had, to them, no special association with the rich. It was claimed as a right, as the sheet anchor of a free life. For it was the means of life – a field of corn, a cabin – that they, their fathers, grandfathers, had wrenched out of a wilderness. And 90-odd years later, an act of Congress, the Homestead Act, would attract settlers into the Midwest and the west by offering – to anyone who would work it – 160 acres of free land.

But in our time, which is to say, from Lenin's time on, property has been to Communists the capitalists' tool, the chief material enemy. So the day in a Communist country when a prime minister says the vital reform must be towards opening up the economy to "private initiative and property" could be a day that would change the world, I shouldn't wonder.

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