20th Century

An unusual collaborative effort among three Baltimore organizations will put the spotlight on 20th-century chamber music next June. Offering seven concerts in three days and making use of three different string quartet ensembles, the New Chamber Festival Baltimore promises to be a lively addition to the local music calendar. "The 20th century was the most prolific musical century we've ever had," says Bill Nerenberg, managing director of the Shriver series and president of the festival.

The 20th century had Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy. We have Paris Hilton and Ivana Trump. The 20th century had the clean chic of celebrity designer (and Baltimorean) Billy Baldwin. We have the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy crew. Is the concept of good taste simply irrelevant these days? Tell Letitia Baldrige, author of the recently published Taste: Acquiring What Money Can't Buy, you're working on a story about good taste, and she'll ask tartly, "Have you found any?" Yes and no. We may no longer have the elite tastemakers like Mrs. Vanderbilt and her 400; but some current celebrities, such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon, are admired for their sense of style, taste and adult behavior.

We've all heard about America's aging population, its immigration challenges and its fiscal irresponsibility — but we rarely think about how these disparate, disturbing trends intersect. Think about the "cultural generation gap," a compelling concept introduced in a Brookings Institution report this month. The concept and its implications take a bit of construction and deconstruction, but its long-term significance for 21st Century America could be as great as the effects that the turn-of-the-20th-Century immigrant influx, the creation of Social Security and the baby boom had on the 20th Century.

Irony fans may note the appearance of "The First Measured Century," a book and public television program taking stock of the American 20th century in a way only the 20th century can: with statistics. It just happens that in America, a century of ever-improving and expanding measurement is ending with a presidential election that resisted measurement. The last count in Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Broward or elsewhere in ChadWorld is not included in the 306-page book, nor in the 3-hour TV show airing at 8:30 tonight.

There is much talk these days of which person should be considered the No. 1 force of the 20th century. For my money, the American is the person of the century -- male or female, whatever color, whatever religion, whatever class. The American. One might think differently if one happened to have the misfortune of being the kind of European who discovered that no amount of education or refinement protects a society from the use of technology to kill on a scale beyond nightmares. First, World War I put something on those kinds of Europeans.

THE tides of history pay little heed to the calendar, and certainly not to the accident of years that end in zeros. In global politics, what we called the 20th century has been over for more than a decade and was only 75 years long. For the northern hemisphere, which still dominates the globe, the 19th century ended in August 1914, when 99 years of relative comity on the continent after the Napoleonic wars was shattered by what became the great European civil war. The end of that civil war was signaled by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

"A Life in the 20th Century," by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Houghton Mifflin Co. 557 pages. $28.95. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has long been one of the country's premier historians. But what sets him apart from most of his brethren is his experiences as a battlefield soldier in some of the most celebrated events of the 20th century. That is why this remarkably candid memoir is an important addition to our knowledge of the World War II years. As a young upward-bound government writer, primarily for the newly created OSS intelligence agency, he describes what it was like inside the fortresses of power where good and brave men worked tirelessly to bring the nation through to victory.

Perhaps it was the goose grease, a homemade remedy for colds. Or maybe the teaspoons of castor oil and camphorated oil. Or the squirrel, muskrat and pig's head Elizabeth Stewart liked to fix and enjoy with a nice cold beer. Stewart certainly did something right: She outlived two husbands, two sons and, not least of all, the entire 20th century. The year she was born, Britain's Queen Victoria died, the first transatlantic radio message was transmitted and a bread toaster cost a grand total of 20 cents.

PADUCAH, Ky. -- The Clintons and the Gores, re-creating the sights, sounds, fumes -- and, they hope, the luck -- of their 1992 campaign, boarded buses yesterday for a post-convention tour of the heartland."