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Good Old Uncle Joe Stalin
American infatuation with its wartime Soviet ally reached a peak in 19.13 with the motion picture, Mission to Moscow , loosely based on Ambassador Joseph E. Davies’ book, in which we see the author (played by Walter Huston) clasp hands with a genial, pipesmoking Soviet dictator. Davies-Huston, according to the Warner Brothers synopsis, has been sent to Russia to get “the truth” for President...
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The Letters Of Publius
Aseries of eighty-five newspaper articles, hastily written for the immediate purpose of advocating New York’s ratification of the new Constitution of the United States, has become the all-time classic on the basic theory of American government. This status hardly could have been anticipated by its authors or contemporary readers; and yet the coming event did cast its shadow before. When their...
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The Look Of The Last Frontier
Harvey Dunn, whose paintings have prompted the commentary by Mari Sandoz which begins on the following page, was a huge man physically. Big, bluff, and hearty, he painted in a big, bluff way. But at the same time he was honest and humble. All his life he sought, as he once said, “to render service to the majesty of simple things.” He grew up on the Dakota frontier. Born in a sodhouse...
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Dakota Country
It’s the invisible something in a picture which makes it a good one. The feeling yon have when you think of those mysterious people … ,” Harvey Dunn liked to tell his painting classes back in the 1930’s. By that time he had been a successful illustrator for many years, but the special quality he tried to achieve is less apparent in his commercial, polished works than in his paintings of old...
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Alfred Ely Beach And His Wonderful Pneumatic Underground Railway
As the Civil War ended, all of New York City was wedged into the lower third of Manhattan Island. The city was compact, teeming, jammed with more than 700,000 people. Thousands more poured in every day as immigrants and refugees. The streets were clogged with horse-drawn vehicles and traffic moved an inch at a time. Public transportation consisted of overloaded streetcars and omnibuses dragged...
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When Rubber Checks Didn’t Bounce
The dark Depression years of the logo’s were n time of economic hardship such as the nation has rarely known: by 1932, unemployment had risen to the thirteen million mark. As more and more banks failed- over five thousand closed their doors between 1930 and 1933—one of the most serious problems was the critical scarcity of money in circulation. In desperation, some communities turned to the...
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“all My Immense Labor For Nothing… ”
Few people today remember the name of Ignatius Donnelly. Mention it, and often as not it will tall forth the wary half smile of someone who hopes he is not having his leg pulled. Yet in Donnelly’s time—the last half of the nineteenth century- his voice was one of the most forceful in the whole farm protest movement, which swept through the Midwest and large sections of the South. Donnelly...
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Revolt In The Pueblos
Few episodes in the long, bloody chronicle of the subjugation of the Indian were more violent than the Pueblo uprising of 1680. Organized and led by the mysterious medicine man, Popé, the New Mexico Indians drove an entire Spanish colony from their land- the one completely successful revolt against the rule of the white man in American history. The story of Popé and the struggle of his people Is...
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Artist Of A Buried World
Who was Catherwood? The name is uncommon enough, yet anyone who has been interested in the history of those strange and haunting Mayas who reared stone cities in the jungles and plains south of Mexico will recognize it instantly: Frederick Catherwood, companion of John Lloyd Stephens and illustrator of his books, the first revelation of the Mayan wonders to the modern world. But Catherwood was...
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“it Was Not A Mutiny”
Many naval historians dispute whether there ever was a mutiny in the history of the U.S. Navy, though they do agree that several near-outbreaks have occurred. In response to an inquiry from AMERICAN HERITAGE , Rear Admiral E. M. Eller, Director of Naval History in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, had this to say: There has never been an actual mutiny on board a ship of the...
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The Old Fraternity Tie
In 1841, about a year before his untimely demise at the end of a rope aboard the Somers , young Philip Spencer was a student at Union College in Schenectady, New York. He had already failed in his studies at another college, and was to be dismissed from Union, too, after a scrape with the authorities. But he remained long enough to help found what has since become a national fraternity, Chi...
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Scandal At Bizarre
   The story of Anne Gary Randolph, called Nancy, is strangely interwoven with that of her spectacular cousin, John Randolph of Roanoke, and touches other famous names in unfamiliar moments; it gives us a glimpse into the intimate history of the times. Her career opened with tragedy before she had come of age, pursued a course of wretchedness and poverty while she was still a young...
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“you Could Never Forget Those Events”
On the site of St. Pierre today are many gaping ruins, with trees growing between the roofless walls. Though the town has been partially resettled it has never regained its vibrancy. Overlooking the bay is a small white building with a pillared entrance. It is a museum built and maintained largely by American citizens; here are many mementos of the great eruption, as well as of other volcanic...
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“Now We Are Kin In Sin…”
 The Waldorf Astoria’s grand ballroom, the evening of December 12, 1900, was packed to the doors with a fashionable audience come to hear a young British journalist tell of his adventures in the Boer War. There had been protests by distinguished New Yorkers, who refused, in sympathy for the South Africans, to attend—and the controversy was much in people’s minds when the toastmaster, Mark...
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Unforgiving Cousin: John Randolph Of Roanoke
John Randolph of Roanoke was a second cousin of Edmund Randolph, President Washington’s first Attorney General and second Secretary of State. It would be difficult to say which of the two careers was the more tragic. There could have been no more striking contrast than that between the two men—the elder, gentle and reflective, his endowments promising happiness and success: the other pursued from...
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“These Lands Are Ours …”
 In its issue of December 2, 1820, the Indiana Centinel of Vincennes, Indiana, published a letter praising a late and much-hated enemy, “Every schoolboy in the Union now knows that Tecumseh was a great man,” it read. “He was truly great—and his greatness was his own, unassisted by science or the aids of education. As a statesman, a warrior and a patriot, take him all in all, we shall not...
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Lest We Forget…
It would be possible to describe the American Civil War as the disastrous result of an ill-advised political maneuver which somehow got out of the control of the men who had started it. Unfortunately, it is just possible that the same melancholy remark may yet be made about the Civil War’s centennial.With the general idea of giving this centennial proper observance there can be little quarrel....
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The Hit-and-Run Raid
Wednesday, October 19, 1864, began as a normally quiet day in the normally quiet county seat village of St. Albans, on Lake Champlain, in far upstate Vermont. For the most part the shopkeepers were refilling their shelves and emptying out their cash drawers following a golden Tuesday. The day before, a skirmish force of Army horse buyers had completed and paid cash for a county-wide roundup of...
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The Backwoods Bull In The Boston China Shop
 At seven o’clock on the evening of December 17, 1877, fifty-eight men gathered in the east dining room of the Brunswick Hotel in Boston to attack one of those gigantic meals which deserve to be regarded as a Victorian art form. The diners had been invited by H. O. Houghton, publisher of the Atlantic Monthly, to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the austere Quaker poet, John Greenleaf...
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When Housekeeping Became A Science
 No other country but ours ever painted so many Utopias—so comprehensive in scope yet so domestic in scale, so tidily balancing plumbing and poetry, or life on earth with life hereafter. The prophets were often male —George Rapp, Robert Dale Owen, George Ripley, Edward Bellamy—but their programs were almost as domestic as Catharine Beecher’s:Let us suppose a colony of cultivated and...
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Faces From The Past—III
 Just by luck, the same summer the Marshalltown fire brigade needed a fast man in the worst way for the fire-fighting competition, someone spotted this youngster from the orphanage, who could run like the wind. To show what an exalted honor it was to belong to a fire brigade, the boy joined up even though it meant missing his high school graduation. There were firemen’s tournaments all...
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Prelude To Doomsday
“Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.” —I Kings 18:44 Devastation by atomic bomb has been known only to our own generation, but on occasions past, nature unassisted has produced effects startlingly like it. Strangely enough, we have had—in this hemisphere and this century—a very real preview of the fate which man’s ingenuity may hold in store for him. The...
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Side-wheels and Walking Beams
 In 1827 James Bard, born in New York in the year of Waterloo, made his first steamboat painting, of the Bellona, the first steamer ever owned by Commodore Vanderbilt. The picture itself has since vanished, but young Bard, a mere twelve or thirteen when he selected his highly specialized career, never lost his childlike simplicity or his enthusiasm for the steamboat, until his death,...
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A Year In Hell
 Like so many men who have spent a great part of their lives championing unsuccessful causes, the elder George Kennan is all but forgotten today. This relative oblivion is as ironic as it is undeserved, for in an important way, he was one of the most influential figures of his time. For all his visionary tendencies and his obsessive sense of mission, Kennan was essentially a journalist with...
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They Knew What They Liked
“I don’t know anything about art, but....” It is doubtless the oldest of all critical bromides, perhaps first uttered by some puzzled paleolith staring at a cave drawing, and echoing down the ages ever since. In every age, it would seem, some pictures draw the crowds and some do not. In our own time, when the galleries bulge with new and bizarre art forms, the struggle for comprehension continues...
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Lord Of San Simeon
 Few men in recent history have been potentially more powerful—if, in the end, more frustrated—than William Randolph Hearst. Born to wealth, he forged a nationwide publishing empire and became in the process the biggest spender of his time. His name grew to be synonymous with “yellow journalism,” and his newspapers could make or break a promising political career, expose a gaudy scandal,...
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The Mighty Wurlitzer
The theater organ, surprisingly enough, is not an American invention. Credit for its creation must be given to an eccentric Englishman named Robert Hope-Jones, an electrical engineer by profession, who first succeeded in electrifying the organ keyboard and doing away with its clumsy levers and wires. Discouraged by the indifference of traditional organ manufacturers to his revolutionary...
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The Many Worlds Of Henry James
To be a cosmopolite is not, I think, an ideal; the ideal should be to be a concentrated patriot. Being a cosmopolite is an accident, but one must make the best of it. If you have lived about, as the phrase is, you have lost that sense of the absoluteness and the sanctity of the habits of your fellow-patriots which once made you so happy in the midst of them…. There comes a time when one set of...
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The Many Worlds Of Henry James
I have not the least hesitation in saying that I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a given moment an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do with both countries,) and far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it ivould be highly civilized. —...
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The Many Worlds Of Henry James
It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons iuhy it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible nurnerosity of...
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The Many Worlds Of Henry James
The brightness always seems to begin while you are still out in the channel, when you fairly begin to see the French coast. You pass into a region of intenser light—a zone of clearness and color. These properties brighten and deepen as you approach the land, and when you fairly stand upon that good Boulognese quay, among the blue and red douaniers and soldiers, the small ugly men in cerulean...
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The Many Worlds Of Henry James
In the garden of the Tuileries [Lambert Strether] had lingered, on two or three spots, to look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as he roamed. The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons...
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The Many Worlds Of Henry James
The aspect the power [New York] wears then is indescribable; it is the power of the most extravagant of cities, rejoicing, as with the voice of the morning, in its might, its fortune, its unsurpassable conditions, and imparting to every object and element, to the motion and expression of every floating, hurrying, panting thing, to the throb of ferries and tugs, to the plash of waves and the...
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The Many Worlds Of Henry James
We are Americans born—il faut en prendre son parti. I look upon it as a great blessing; and I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. We have exquisite qualities as a race, and it seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose and...
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Whistler’s War Against Respectability
HOLKER: You have sent pictures to the Academy which have not been received? WHISTLER: I believe that is the experience of all artists. ( Laughter .) HOLKER: What is the subject of the Nocturne in Black and Gold ? WHISTLER: It is a night piece, and represents the fireworks at Cremorne. HOLKER: Not a view of Cremorne? WHISTLER: If it were called a view of Cremorne, it would...
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Main Street
On July 17, 1920, Sinclair Lewis delivered the finished manuscript of Main Street to Alfred Harcourt in the hope that it would sell 10,000 copies. Harcourt was enthusiastic. He thought that it was great; he thought that it would probably sell as many as 20,000 copies before it stopped, and his sales manager believed that they could probably expect a sale of 25,000. In the first six months of...
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Faces From The Past—IV
 The crowd began collecting early at the Winter Garden. All over the city billboards proclaimed the evening’s benefit as one of the great performances of the age, and lower Broadway had a holiday air of excitement. Men were dying in the trenches in Petersburg, Virginia; Sherman’s men, in the capital of Georgia, were lighting their campfires with Confederate money; but in New York the three...
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The Minister And The Mill Girl
About nine on the morning of Friday, December 21, 1832, John Durfee, a farmer of Tiverton, Rhode Island, was driving his team through his stackyard when he noticed something inside swaying against one of the five-foot stakes. Leaping forward, he saw the body of a woman. Her knees hung six inches above the ground; her legs were bent backward, the toes balancing on the grass; her head lolled...
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Fiorello’s Finest Hour
 Fiorello La Guardia ran for office thirteen times. He was defeated three times: on his first trial for Congress in 1914, on his last trial for Congress in 1932, and on his first trial for mayor of New York in 1929. That 1929 contest against the popular and notorious Jimmy Walker was his most vigorous offensive. It was, in effect, his tryout for his successful mayoralty campaign four years...
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By Canoe To Empire
 Few lands have been fought over so bitterly as Canada in the eighteenth century; and yet, at the time it was considered by most people to be practically worthless. Voltaire’s dismissal of the St. Lawrence Valley as “a few acres of snow” is almost too well-known to repeat; it is less well-known that Montcalm, who now is a Canadian hero, loathed the country he fought to defend. The British...
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The Best Ree-maining Seats
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon had nothing on our balcony …” This flourish from the opening fanfare of a Midwest movie palace sometime around 1928 posed interesting questions. Was it Twenty Degrees Cooler inside the Hanging Gardens? Were they tended by platoons of dragoons armed with flashlights and smelling salts? Was there a Mighty Wurlitzer to soothe the savage breast? Did stars twinkle...
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Walter Camp And His Gridiron Game
  The spectators could see the elevens hurl themselves together and build themselves in kicking, writhing heaps. They had a general vision of threatening attitudes, fists shaken before noses, dartings hither and thither, throttling, wrestling and the pitching of individuals headlong to earth; and all this was an exceedingly animated picture which drew from them volley after volley of...
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A Near Thing at Yorktown
It has been called “the one decisive engagement” of the American Revolution, since by closing the crucial gap in the ring around Cornwallis at Yorktown, it changed American independence from a possibility to a certainty. Yet many Americans have never heard of it, perhaps because the outcome of the long and bitter war was decided between the French and British navies, with no Americans present....
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With Cornwallis At Yorktown
While the French fleet was preventing the evacuation of Cornwallis by sea, French and American troops laid siege to his land positions. Some idea of the rigors of that siege has come down to us in the diary of a German corporal named Stephan Popp. The document, recently found in the library of the Historical Society in Bayreuth, Germany, Stephan’s native town, has been translated by the Reverend...
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Bancroft: The Historian As Celebrity
George Bancroft was the most successful of all American historians. Three generations ago, at a time when history was still considered literature, the volumes of his History of the United States stood on the shelves of thousands of American homes. During most of the nineteenth century it was a solid best seller. Now his once-so-popular volumes are left untouched not only in the proverbial...
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From The Smart Set
This “Main Street” I commend to your polite attention. It is, in brief, good stuff … Here is the essential tragedy of American life, and if not the tragedy, then at least the sardonic farce; the disparate cultural development of male and female, the great strangeness that lies between husband and wife when they begin to function as members of society. The men, sweating at their sordid concerns...
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Americans Abroad
  Worn out by the excitement of his first day in one of the cities of his dreams, a young American managed to find time that evening to dash off a letter from Rome to his younger brother in the States. “At last—” he wrote, “for the first time—I live! … I went reeling and moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment.” The newly born and ecstatic consciousness belonged to Henry...
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Untitled
“Agriculture is all at an end—and will remain so God knows how long. Provisions are all brought from other countries and yet, though there is an immense quantity on hand the prices are beyond anything ever before heard of. I will just give you a summary: Salt Pork here [San Francisco] 75 cents per Ib., at the mines $200 per Barrel. Flour $2.00 per Ib. Bread at the mines one to one half dollars...
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“this Is A Beautiful World; But I Shall See A Fairer”
Henry David Thoreau died a hundred years ago, leaving behind no material possessions worth speaking of. He had lived a short and, by most criteria, an uneventful life. After graduating without great distinction from Harvard, he had worked in desultory fashion at odd jobs around Concord, Massachusetts: as a schoolteacher, woodchopper, and general handyman. He was coolly disinterested in making...
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Untitled
“Of all the cities in the world this is the greatest one, composed of all nations and colers, and the hairiest set of fellows that ever existed…” — San Francisco described, in a miner’s journal .
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