Your recent article on the 1936 General Motors strike (April/May 1982) interested me greatly, as I was a young GM staff assistant then. I remember that after the strike was over and production resumed, a meeting was called in Detroit of manufacturing and personnel people from all the plants. Over two hundred people must have been in the big meeting room, where we listened to the boss of all GM production, William S. Knudsen. After calling the meeting to order, he started out by saying in his wonderful Danish accent:
“Gentlemen, the reason for this meeting reminds me of a story. An actor friend of mine once went to New York to get in a play. He needed a place to live, and so he went to a boardinghouse he had heard about. He knocked, and the landlady came to the door. ‘Good morning, madam,’ he said. ‘What are your best terms for actors?’
” ‘My best terms for actors are bastards and sons-of-bitches.’ Then she closed the door in his face.
“Now, gentlemen, we cannot treat the labor people that way any more.”
Charles T. Keppel Montrose, N.Y.
THE PROPER PLYMPTON
I strongly suspect that the Colonel Plympton whose portrait appears on page 112 of your April/May issue is Peter Plympton of Missouri and not “Old Ring”—Joseph Plympton of Massachusetts.
The portrait (which is printed backwards) is that of an infantry officer of the period from 1851 to 1861. He appears to me to be about thirty years of age, which is thirty-five years younger than Joseph Plympton, a War of 1812 veteran, would have been.
Peter Plympton (U.S.M.A. 1847) was born about 1827 and was brevetted lieutenant colonel in 1862 for gallantry and meritorious service at the battle of Peratta, New Mexico. He would therefore have been addressed as “colonel” until his death in 1866.
The officer may, of course, be someone else. I am sure, however, that “Old Ring” would have shown more tarnish in the 185Os than the gentleman portrayed here.
Capt. Roger D. Cunningham Killeen, Tex.
We’ll back Peter Plympton as the subject. But the portrait is not printed backwards—it appears so because a daguerreotype is quite literally a mirror image.
THE TWO SPRAGUES
The portfolio of Albert Murray’s combat art that ran in February/March of 1982 includes a marvelous portrait of Admiral Thomas L. Sprague. The caption describes him as having engaged a vastly superior Japanese force off Samar on October 25, 1944. You have the wrong Admiral Sprague. Clifton “Ziggy” Sprague was the commanding officer in that fight.
Thomas E. Pierett Spring, Tex.
Mr. Pierett is quite right. It was Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague who took in his escort group “Taffy-3”—six small escort carriers and seven destroyers and destroyer escorts—against four Japanese battleships and a clutch of heavy cruisers. “I didn’t think we’d last five minutes,” he said, but “I thought we might as well give them all we’ve got before we go down.”
Admiral Thomas Sprague’s escort group “Taffy-1” was 130 miles away at the time, but it, too, had a busy day; on the way to help his friend “Ziggy,” Thomas Sprague’s group suffered the first Kamikaze attack of the war.
In the meantime the Japanese broke off and withdrew. Clifton Sprague wrote: “I heard one of the signalmen yell, ‘Goddamnit, boys, they’re getting away!’ I could not believe my eyes, but it looked as if the whole Japanese Fleet was indeed retiring … I could not get the fact to soak into my battle-numbed brain. At best, I had expected to be swimming by this time.”
NOW IT CAN BE SUNG
In the article “Lincoln’s Life Preserver” in the February/March 1982 issue, Charles Strozier refers to a Third Republic ban on the Marseillaise. I am sure Professor Strozier meant to refer to Napoleon III’s Second Empire as the source of the ban on the republican hymn. After all, the Third Republic was not founded until 1871, six years after Lincoln’s death.
Mark M. Lowenthal Reston, Va.
SURVIVORS
Since my husband and I are connoisseurs in a small way of American covered bridges, I call your attention to an error in the article “Electra Webb and Her American Past” in the April/May issue.
The piece refers to the covered bridge at the entrance to Shelburne Village as having an outside sidewalk, the last of its kind in America. Fortunately, that’s not true.
The town of Newton Falls in northeastern Ohio has a covered bridge with an outside sidewalk, and what’s more, the bridge is still in use. In addition, at Mohican State Park, also in Ohio, a covered bridge with outside walkway was built in the late fifties or early sixties by the state (wonderful Ohio!).
Leslie Parsons Redford, Mich.
LAWTON’S LAST WORDS
The piece on General Henry Ware Lawton in the April/May issue reflects two omissions.
The first, fully documented, demonstrates that this doughty warrior’s propensity to drink long antedated his tenure as military governor of Santiago. In his introduction to Chasing Geronimo: The Journal of Leonard Wood, Jack C. Lane writes that during the 1886 pursuit of the Apache warrior, “Lawton’s sole weakness seems to have been his strong taste for liquor, not uncommon among frontier soldiers. But alcohol turned Lawton into a raging tyrant, a condition which interfered with the performance of his duties. He had little patience, however, with subordinate officers who drank to excess. During the Geronimo campaign he dismissed one of his lieutenants and sent him back to Fort Huachuca charged with misconduct on account of drunkenness. Yet there is much evidence that Lawton himself did some hard drinking during the campaign and that Wood and others saved his career more than once by smoothing over his drunken rages.”
The second omission is supported by firm tradition: When General Lawton was killed, the reporter covering the event cabled home that the fallen American general “died with his Maker’s name on his lips.” This was literally true. But General Lawton’s actual words were, “Jesus Christ! I’ve been shot!”
Col. Frederick Bernays Wiener, Ret. Phoenix, Ariz.
