Speaking of Supreme Court decisions on minimal labor standards, Professor William E. Leuchtenburg in “The Case of the Chambermaid and the Nine Old Men” (December 1986) writes that “many commentators even believe that the Court has forever abandoned its power of judicial review in this field.” This attitude seems odd to me. These commentators apparently don’t realize that the Supreme Court committed an about-face to achieve many of the later decisions. Can interpretational stability be founded on interpretational change? Can any Supreme Court decision be forever if political pressures bear upon Court appointments? Cannot the Supreme Court someday again take “judicial notice of the unparalleled demands” of some unforeseen economic calamity in the future?
Timothy Cary
San Diego, Calif.
Wrong City
The frontispiece of the August/September 1986 issue shows a painting of Edward Delano’s name with a reference to “clusters of Chinese figures set against Macao’s harbor.” But the walled city in the background with Spanish flags flying prominently over it is Manila, the figures forming the letters of the family name, Delano, are Filipinos in mid-nineteenth-century dress, and the painter, whose name appears in the lower left-hand corner, is the Filipino José Honorato Lozano. The human figures forming the name Edward are Chinese, who were important in the commerce and crafts of Spanish Manila. The painting is similar to the two Lozanos in the Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts.
Benito Legarda
Bethesda, Md.
The author’s reply: Mr. Legarda is right. Ned Delano visited Manila several times; perhaps it was on one of these visits that he had this picture painted and another to match it, built around his mother’s name, Catherine Delano.
Capitalist Champion
Peter Baida’s “The Man Who Raised Hell” (October/November 1986) captures the spirit of Henry George and his vision of a society in which the prosperity of some is not won at the expense of the abject poverty of others.
George, however, was decidedly proenterprise, not “one of the fiercest critics of business.” It seems misguided to conclude that George “remains a voice that American business would prefer to forget.” George distinguished—as too many economists fail to do—between honest gains of production and ill-gotten gains of special privilege. Capitalism’s incentive system had no stronger champion than George, nor exploitation a mightier opponent. Businessmen seeking to repair America’s loss of vitality at home and competitiveness abroad, far from forgetting George, would be well advised to look to his farsighted analyses for crucial ways to resolve these problems.
Walter Rybeck
Kensington, Md.
Professors and Vietnam
I am writing both to commend American Heritage for publishing Ronald H. Specter’s “What Did You Do in the War, Professor?” (December 1986) and to attempt to set the record straight with respect to two of his criticisms: that professors of the war lack direct experience and that they even lack knowledge of the conflict.
All of us who are in the business of teaching and writing on the Vietnam War can be grateful to Dr. Spector for calling attention to the growing interest in the Vietnam War on American campuses. Specter’s account of the personal odyssey of his own course over time and space presents a vivid glimpse into the shifting concerns that animate this interest.
In two respects, however, I feel he has done a disservice to his fellow-travelers in this profession. First, he has understated the number of professors on the war who have personal experience of it. Based on the Project on the Vietnam Generation survey, he comes to the conclusion that only 6 of the 236 respondents surveyed were actual veterans of the conflict. If this is the case, the validity of this survey must be highly suspect. Here at Duke University we have four courses on the Vietnam War, and all four professors are Vietnam veterans. I personally know of at least a half-dozen other Vietnam veterans teaching such courses elsewhere. In addition, other courses are taught by professors with government or academic-field experience in Vietnam; men and women like Douglas Pike, Alan Goodman, William J. Duiker, Samuel Popkin, and Marilyn Young, to name just a few.
Second, Dr. Spector asserts that most professors of the Vietnam War lack knowledge of the war because they leave the research and publishing on the war to others, most notably “journalists and former participants in the war.” At best this is a serious oversight. Indeed, there is a large and growing body of scholarly work on the Vietnam War that parallels that of nonacademics and, I would like to think, is equally influential. In addition to the works of Alan Goodman, William J. Duiker, Jeffrey Race, and George Herring (whom Spector does mention), there are the writings of Alexander Woodside, Guenter Lewy, Samuel Popkin, Carlyle Thayer, William Turley, David Marr, Truong Buu Lam, and George McT. Kahin. For those of us teaching in this field, then, there are ample source materials from our academic colleagues to fill any seminar.
Thus, both because of and in spite of Dr. Spector’s article, the future of scholarship on the Vietnam War is assured a vital place on the American college campus.
Timothy J. Lomperis
Duke University
Durham, N.C.
Rich’s Rewards
Reading Peter Baida’s “A Happy Heart at Bloomingdale’s” (December 1986) recalled to me when department stores were in their heyday. To go to one was a real adventure. Rich’s in Atlanta was one store that my mother loved. When I was in college, Rich’s gave two girls from every college in the state free trips to the Metropolitan Opera when the opera was in Atlanta. This was two girls every night for six nights. Rich’s paid our train fare, taxi fare, hotel bill, and provided a chaperone.
Mrs. S. H. Hurt
Marion, Ala.
Rich’s Rewards
Peter Baida neatly nips the nostalgia for once-upon-a-time amenities in his comment on the changing department store. An additional point is that the one-time slathering of service that ranged from “silence” rooms to plentiful personal attention was possible because of low wages and high markups. Decent pay for those who provide the services means the consumer has to decide, as Baida points out, if the cost is worth it. Someone does pay for free lunches.
A woman I know returned from a stay in India. When asked how difficult life must be in so poor a country, she replied that there was no problem because everyone has servants.
Lloyd McAulay
New York, N.Y.
First Humpster
As one of your addicts, I was delighted with the August/September 1986 issue of American Heritage. For one thing, I was once a Fuller Brush Man. For another, I went through the Great Depression (“The Big Picture of the Great Depression”) during my teens. For yet another, trying to make a new career as a writer, I found ironic solace in reading “The Blighted Life of the Writer, Circa 1840.” As for “Positively the Last Word on Baseball,” thanks, but I wish Elting E. Morison would furnish a glossary for sport fans residing outside the United States and Japan. But the high point of my reading of this particular issue was Richard Rhodes’s article, “The Toughest Flying in the World.”
I was a “Humpster.” In fact, 1 believe I was the first Humpster. As a 2d lieutenant in the then U.S. Army Air Corps, I piloted the first Douglas C-47 to leave MacDill Field, Florida, as a member of the HALPRO unit bound for the China-Burma-India Theater in March 1942 and went (with secret orders signed by the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson) to the CBI by way of the South Atlantic route mentioned by Mr. Rhodes, except that Ascension Island not being then available to us, we flew directly from Brazil to Liberia. According to my log, that transatlantic flight took fourteen hours and thirty-five minutes, made possible by doubling the plane’s fuel range when we installed four fuel tanks in the fuselage.
I had just turned twenty-three the previous month and was the oldest member of the crew, with zero command experience, having graduated only the previous October with the Class of 41-H from the Randolph-Kelly Fields Flying Cadet Training Progam. Needless to say, it was the most exciting adventure of mv life.
HALPRO, following me, was diverted to North Africa when Rommel’s Afrika Corps burst British defenses and reached Al-Alamein, so 1 lost my CO by pounding on to China, where I got “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the top gun in the area. He was at Shwebo, in Burma, when I arrived, preparing to walk out at the head of a Chinese army. Acting for him was an Infantry colonel named Olds, the only American officer I found at a British RAF airport named Dinjan. It was the jump-off point from Assam into Burma and China and served as the headquarters for me and other transport crewmen straggling into the area.
We were quartered in a British tea planter’s house, a rambling structure built on steel rails ten feet above tea and mud. It was raining when I landed at Dinjan and it was raining when I reached “Dingleberry,” the name we gave the house, and, so help me, I never saw either place when it was not raining.
Checking the weather was a joke. Colonel Olds saw no reason for it so long as he could get around in a Jeep—and he gave me unshirted hell for stalling around about such a silly concern. He had loaded my plane with five-gallon cans of aviation fuel bound for Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group that was then flying out of a Chinese strip named Loiwing. It was not on any map, but I was told to goddamn well find it.
Maps were another joke. I was using one printed by National Geographic and another I had picked up at Karachi; it showed all of Southeast Asia. Burma bore white splotches marked “unexplored.” The colonel had nothing better except rough-and-ready estimates of the heights of the mountains surrounding Dinjan on three sides. North were the Himalayas- don’t go that way, they were big trouble. East was a spur of that range running north-south, marking the border between Burma and China. South was a range called the Naga Hills—only nine thousand feet, but populated by headhunters.
The first flight out of Dinjan was the hairiest experience of my life. Taking off in rain, I went on instruments all the way up to fifteen thousand feet before I broke out, circling and praying all the way. Sucking on an oxygen tube, I took my bearings from the fantastic mountain peaks to the north and simply flew east until I saw breaks in the overcast, then found Loiwing by landing at two other places to ask for directions.
I met Chennault that day and delivered the load of gas. When he asked how I had found his base, I showed him my map. I think that was the only time I ever saw him laugh. But I was not laughing; I had no idea how to get back to Dinjan. He sent me to Shwebo (to pick up Stilwell, who turned down the offer of a ride) and gave me a heading northwest over the Naga Hills that did the trick—right off the top of his head.
A year and a half later I made it back to the States after about a hundred such flights, plus others all over southern China, never knowing that I must have been one of the best transport jockeys in the world until my suspicion was confirmed by Rhodes’s article.
Capt. Robert L. Hartzell, USAF (Ret.)
Málaga, Spain
101 Things Continued
Professor Garraty’s conclusion in "101 Things Every College Graduate Should Know About American History” (December 1986) that the Dred Scott decision of 1857 was “The Worst Supreme Court Decision” is definitely arguable.
I firmly believe that Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion in the case was the most fortuitous Supreme Court decision—the one that saved the Union- despite its immediate consequences. My reasoning has to do with the decision’s timing, not its wretched conclusions. By the late 185Os both the North and South were in a lather over the extension of slavery, and slavery itself. Clearly, however, only the South was contemplating disunion, and at a time when a weak, foolish, and irresolute leader, James Buchanan, was President of the United States.
Lacking Lincoln’s utter resolution that the Union must be saved, and without his rhetorical genius and political skills, Buchanan might well have lost the Union for good, as a leaderless people accepted the Confederacy, in disgust, but as the lesser of two evils.
We will never know what the results of a “good” Dred Scott decision would have been, but it’s a fair bet that such men as Texas’s “Pass the Biscuits Pappy” O’Daniel (now there’s a nickname!) would have found themselves elected to the Senate of the Confederate States of America.
Robert Weinstock
Phoenix, Ariz.
101 Things Continued
Professor Garraty is one of my favorite American historians, but I do think that his list in the December issue really ought to include the Gettysburg Address, which my generation remembers verbatim. Also there’s this souvenir of the 1940 presidential election that left Republicans unamused: A horse’s tail is long and silky/Lift it up—there’s Wendell Willkie!”
Paul Zeigler II
Berea, Ohio
We’ll Try
American Heritage, which is one of the few magazines we retain longer than three years, has always been one that provides the sort of esoteric information that is so difficult for the public-library patron to obtain easily. Please keep up the consistently fine quality of your articles for the sake of all those eager readers of American history.
Jan Louch
Douglas County Public Library
Minden, Nev.
Correction: In the article “Citizen Ford” (October/November 1986 issue), the date at which Chevrolet introduced hydraulic brakes in their cars was incorrectly stated as 1924. The correct date is 1936.
