We were pleased last year to publish for the first time (June/ July 1980) the private diary Harry S. Truman scribbled for his own information at Potsdam when, as the new President, he attended his first summit conference. His observations about the other world leaders were typically pungent.
While Truman was reacting to his counterparts, a young lieutenant, gleeful to have been assigned to duty at Potsdam, was reacting to Truman. This officer, James M. Vardaman, has sent us some letters he wrote home at the time. Lieutenant Vardaman had an unusual entree; he was the nephew of Truman’s naval aide, and he was introduced to an awesome roster of military and civilian brass. He confided to his mother that “I have to pinch myself every five minutes to see if I am not dreaming.” He noted that Stalin never seemed to change expression although “theoretically [he] smiles just as other humans do…” and he mentions Churchill “strolling out alone with his big cigar.”
But Truman was the person who completely captivated him. “He is the grandest and most natural man you ever saw,” Vardaman wrote his mother on August 2, 1945, as the conference was winding down. “The morning of the first there was nothing to do, and he got rather lonely, I think. So he wandered around from room to room just visiting and happy as a lamb about going home. He must have been in to see us four or five times. Once [we] were sitting around discussing women in general and our women in particular. All at once we heard, ‘Well, how’s the war going today?’ There he was standing in the doorway smiling from ear to ear. We jumped up and he came in asking us to sit down. As he passed me, he clasped my arm and, almost pulling me into the chair, said, ‘Sit down, sit down, sit down.’ I actually think he meant it but I wouldn’t have sat down for the world. I feel just as at home with him as I do with Dad, and so does everyone else and they are crazy about him. By this time you should have figured out … that I am pretty much of a Democrat.”
Now in civilian life, Mr. Vardaman is by profession a consulting forester and by avocation a bird watcher. In 1979 he set himself the staggering task, in birding terms, of sighting 700 varieties in a year—a goal that eluded him, but just barely; he sighted 699. CBS, Time, and even the Wall Street Journal all recorded his impressive near miss.
OF ULTRA, SIGABA, BOMBE, AND OTHER ENIGMAS
“Be secret and exult,” wrote William Butler Yeats in a phrase military men and warring nations would take to heart—as a current exhibit at the National Museum of American Historyin Washington, D. C., demonstrates. The exhibit—which is on display in the museum’s Computer Hall, fittingly enough—features cryptographic machines used during World War I and World War II. Recently declassified, most of the material is on loan from the National Security Agency.
Among the devices in the show is the German Enigma, used during World War II to send out thousands of ULTRA messages that the Nazis considered undecipherable by the Allies. Also on display is a rare photograph of the Bombe, an Allied machine used to break the Enigma’s code, together with one of the intercepted ULTRA messages. Other items include the U.S. M-134C, otherwise known as Sigaba, an electric cipher machine used for strategic exchanges between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt; a World War I Navy Cipher Box; and the U.S. Army’s M-94, a disk cipher patterned after a design conceived by Thomas Jefferson.
The exhibition will run through February of next year.
GOOD EVENING (AGAIN), EVERYBODY
It was clear from our recent interview with Lowell Thomas (AMERICANHERITAGE, August/September 1980) that he has been everywhere and met everyone during his long career, but we were not prepared to find that he had slipped onto our own pages unnoticed last April. Yet he did. In a “Postscripts to History” item in that issue we told of Mary Gladwin, a World War I nurse, and accompanied her story with a photograph of her and two unidentified soldiers. Mr. Thomas wrote in to point out that he was the man in the middle, and a letter nurse Gladwin wrote to her hometown newspaper in 1918 confirms it. Mr. Thomas, she wrote, was “an interesting guest” who planned “to deliver illustrated lectures … upon his return to the United States.”
Mr. Thomas also sent us the curious picture below, and, while he does not appear in it, he is largely responsible for its existence. Sixty-nine years ago this summer, Mr. Thomas was an eager young reporter in Chicago, covering the 1912 Republican convention for the Chicago Journal. The paper had also hired William Jennings Bryan to report on the convention as a celebrity commentator. Someone at the Journal decided that an interview between Bryan and his ancient foe, Theodore Roosevelt, would make an ideal exclusive and, while his bosses went to work on the arrangements, Thomas and a photographer named Saito decided to manufacture a photograph to go with the feature. Thomas recalls that Saito first cajoled TR into posing in his chair and Bryan then “gladly played his role in … [our] political drama.” But, alas, the two men never actually met. TR refused to see Bryan (whom he cordially disliked), and the Great Commoner himself left town halfway through the proceedings to organize his own forces at the upcoming Democratic convention in Baltimore. This historic (but not historical) composite photograph has never before been published.
A MORAL MINORITY
Perhaps for the first time in our history, two members of the President’s cabinet attend the same small country church. Contributor John Maass of Philadelphia points out that Secretary of Health and Human Services Richard S. Schweiker and Secretary of Transportation Andrew L. Lewis are both active members of the Central Schwenkfelder Church in Worcester, Pennsylvania. “The Schwenkfelders are one of the smallest denominations in the United States,” he writes.“They have only five churches in southeastern Pennsylvania and 2,748 members.
“Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig (1490–1561) was a worldly German nobleman of Silesia who gave up his career as a courtier to become a dedicated preacher and reformer. In a time of cruel bigotry Schwenckfeld pleaded for peace, tolerance, and ecumenism: ‘A true Christian life is not bound to place, time, vestment, person, meats, and similarly purely formal matter. Quite the contrary,’ he said, ‘it consists in the individual trust in God.’ His followers were persecuted by both Catholics and Lutherans and finally fled their homes to seek refuge in the Quakers’ Pennsylvania, where all creeds were welcomed. The Schwenkfelders’ Mayflower was the St. Andrew, which brought 164 Germans to Philadelphia on September 22, 1734. Two days later they held a Thanksgiving service. Their descendants still celebrate that day with a traditional meal of bread, apple butter, and cider. Schwenckfeld’s followers in Europe died out long ago, but the American Schwenkfelder Church prospers. American scholars worked for sixty-three years to collect and publish Schwenckfeld’s writings in nineteen thick volumes. The Schwenkfelders have always stood for the separation of church and state, and they send their children to the public schools. What makes an American join such a minute community? The very smallness may be an asset: to be a Schwenkfelder is like belonging to one big family.
“The recent history of the First Schwenkfelder Church of Philadelphia also tells something of these people’s spirit. Founded in 1898, the church stood in what is now called ‘a changing neighborhood.’ After old Pastor Kriebel died, the membership dwindled to fifteen, but the Schwenkfelders refused to give up their church. In 1974 they recruited a minister who was working with juvenile gangs. Now the Reverend T. Arnold Brooker ministers to a congregation of 250 black Schwenkfelders.”
…ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK
In “Assassin on Trial” (June/July 1981) author John M. Taylor declared that “it is difficult today to convey the grief and outrage” that greeted the assassination of President James A. Garfield by Guiteau in 1881. For some, however, grief was tempered by the clang of the cash register.
Take, for example, the son of Nathaniel Currier, of the New York printmaking firm of Currier & Ives. Garfield, shot on July 2, died of his wound on September 19; on September 21, Currier’s son wrote to his father to break the good news: “The demand for Garfield pictures is perfectly overwhelming, it surpasses everything. We took twelve hundred and twenty-five dollars in hard cash over the counter today!! We could have sold more but we could not get them.…”
Four days later, the news was even better: “Our cash sales for the week have been very heavy. A rough estimate would be thirty-five hundred dollars for the last five days. … We have not been able to strike a balance as all our spare time has been devoted to getting money into the bank. Silver, greenbacks, and nickels have flowed in like a mountain torrent.
“At times the store has been so packed with buyers that you had to elbow your way through to the back part. We had to barricade to keep the crowd in the front part of the store.
“At times they yelled so for pictures that the neighbors were scared and put their heads out of the window to see what the matter was.…”
These two letters, along with eightyeight others written by Currier between 1881 and 1885, were recently acquired by the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.
