January 2011

It was a cold January day on Capitol Hill. In the chamber of the House of Representatives, however, the oratory alone was nearly enough to fend off the winter chill, for the topic under debate was American relations with Russia.

“Can we have friendship,” cried a gentleman from West Virginia, “between tyranny and liberty; between Asiatic despotism and modern civilization? … There is no friendship and there can be no friendship between such opposing forces. I hope the hour will come when we can clasp the Russian hand in honest and cordial friendship, but that day should not come until the Tartar has mended his ways; until Poland is free; until persecution for opinion’s and religion’s sake shall have ceased, and until constitutional government shall prevail from the Baltic to Bering Sea.”

The richly decorated scroll above, dated July 10, 1923, was presented by the Soviet government to Her ben Hoover, chairman of the American Relief Administration during the Russian lamine just ended, “in the name of the millions of people who have been saved, as well as in the name of the whole working people of Soviet Russia … to express the most deeply felt sentiments of gratitude, and to state, that all the people inhabiting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics never will forget the aid rendered to them by the American People …”

About all that remains today of the Woods Motor Car is the memory suggested by a tattered catalogue. The time was 1900, and the automobile was very much a carriage without the horse; the four Woods models shown overleaf further bear out the impression. The names are taken from carriage styles, and the descriptions, which we quote verbatim, are aimed not at the mob but the nabob, the kind of consumer who kept liveried coachmen and footmen as a matter of course.

The grandparents, or the great-grandparents, or the great-great-grandparents of millions of Americans had as their last view of Europe the diked lowlands where the Weser River leaves Bremen, widens, and Hows into the North Sea. This coastal country is austere and lonely, and looks today much as it must have looked for generations, sparsely dotted with thatched farmhouses that have the sturdy but not particularly cordial air of the house that the smart little pig built. When the sun shines, the light has the diffused and tender quality of the light in a Dutch landscape painting. But there are more storms here than sunshine; and the hostile weather may have struck more than one emigrant as symbolic of the ordeals he had to pass through.

Our guest reviewer this month is Peter Lyon, free-lance writer and a co-author of the American Heritage Book of the Pioneer Spirit. Elsewhere in this issue (see page 33) he confronts a number of western “heroes,” as depicted in motion pictures und television, with their historical counterparts. To the average reader who takes up’ a book about the West he here offers assistance in telling where fact leaves off and fiction begins. —The Editors

Inch by inch, humanity edges forward. First it was the wheel, and the next thing you know we had hieroglyphics, vitamins, and Duz doing everything. But, as everyone is aware, there is another, rather dark side to this shining picture, tor progress tends to skip about a little at times, getting things all out of order. Sometimes inventions come too early, as in the case of Eratosthenes of Alexandria, who figured out way back in the third century before Christ, and before the information was of any use, that the earth has a circumference of about 25,000 miles. On the other hand, a new device may come at the very last minute, like radar, which did so much to save England from the Luftwaffe . But sometimes, to be candid, the inventor dawdles shockingly. In the case we are discussing here, for example, he has, by a paradox, both made and missed the boat.