January 2011

Pure communism has been tried a few times in America by various Utopian communities, all of which eventually failed. Pure Marxism later attracted, relatively speaking, only a modest body of adherents. And the American Communist party, which was neither purely communist in the old sense nor true to the Marxist ideology, would seem—by the surface statistics, at least—to have been of no great importance either. At no time in its history, for example, did it have more than 80,000 members; it was an apparently ragged and hopeless cause, sometimes harassed but generally tolerated by the generosity of American law. That this was only the visible part of the iceberg many intelligent people long realized, but thousands, indeed millions, did not. How this “party,” in effect an arm of Soviet absolutism, deluded so many liberal-minded people, how it penetrated so deeply and dangerously into the political and intellectual life of the United States, is the burden of the article which begins on the next page, and which concludes, on a most important note, our series on America and Russia.

It was midsummer, and by the calendar of the Foreign Dogs of the West, the year 1859. Word came to the royal Chinese officials at Peking that an American barbarian chieftain, John E. Ward, was at the coast awaiting arrangements to proceed to the capital. He bore a letter from his Emperor, James Buchanan, addressed to the Divine Son of Heaven, and he was also ready to exchange ratified copies of the Treaty of Tientsin, signed the year before and since approved by his Senate. He desired that the agreement, respecting trade at various ports, be put into effect.

One of the qualities that has given Washington Irving a lasting reputation in American literature is his extraordinary ability to paint a picture with words, to evoke the sights and sounds and smells of spirited battles, peaceful landscapes, and the colorful legends of the past. His pages abound in passages of almost irresistible appeal to the artist. “You opened to me.” the British painter C. R. Leslie wrote to him, “a new range of observation of my own art and a perception of the qualities and character of things …”

When in 1809 Irving published a satiric history of Dutch New York, he adopted the pseudonym “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” described in press notices as “a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat” who had strangely disappeared, leaving behind a very curious manuscript. Irving, whose authorship was known almost immediately, hoped that his popular spoof would long be “thumbed and chuckled over by the family fireside.” Spoof or not, passages like those quoted on these two pages—and illustrations like the ones shown with them—have given generations of readers their image of early New York. The sketch of Knickerbocker above is Darley’s. Maxfield Parrish, 20th-century book, poster, and magazine artist, drew the Indian at left, whom Irving described as follows:

If you mean to be a historical figure, it is a good idea to get in touch with a leading literary figure—a Longfellow, a Homer, a Virgil. Paul Revere, Odysseus, Aeneas—they all took this precaution. Poor Captain Jack Jouett didn’t. And as a result this six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound giant from Virginia, who saved the leaders of the American Revolution from a disheartening and possibly disastrous reverse, has been left out of practically all the history books.

His forty-mile ride from Cuckoo Tavern to Monticello was one of the significant minor exploits of the struggle for independence. Unfortunately, it lacks a chronicler of adequate stature. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, God rest his bones, put Revere on the map. He even gave us the exact hour at which Paul reached Concord on his “midnight ride,” despite the fact that Revere himself says he was captured by the British before he got there. Jack Jouett’s far longer and more perilous nocturnal dash across the Virginia countryside sorely needs a rousing ballad, preferably accurate as to facts, but comparable in popular appeal to the famous “Paul Revere’s Ride.”