January 2011

The horrid fascination which the Hitler epoch exerts on inquiring minds extends to the personalities involved; and the oddest of all the odd lot of queer fish who swam across that scene must by all accounts be the man who built up and operated the SS, Heinrich Himmler himself. If no man is a hero to his valet, no man is likely to be a hero to his masseur, either, and it is Dr. Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur, who presents this picture of him. It is as weird a picture as you are likely to find in all the literature of Hitler’s Germany.

The story is not yet complete. Mr. Reitlinger indicates where the historian’s responsibility lies, and Dr. Kersten presents a slice of the miserable material with which the historian is obliged to work. It remains to take a look at the way in which history wrongly written and basely interpreted can twist the life of a whole nation out of shape.

We stick with the boys in the jackboots—the blackshirts. The exhibit now is a work called Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny , by Edward Crankshaw, which rounds out the picture presented by the two previous books and which is yet another chapter in the strange tale of bits and pieces which the historian has to bear in mind. Mr. Crankshaw is concerned, basically, with the hideous things that can happen to a people who have perverted history, who know everything about the past except what it really means, who can study history devoutly without ever once realizing that it is really the story of actual, flesh-and-blood human beings.

It was the afternoon of America.

As the Nineteenth Century turned slowly into its final quarter, the life most New Englanders knew was that of the small town or the farm. In their land of long winters, the most precious time was summer when the smells, the sounds, and silences of nature were all the more acute for being crowded into so brief a span. All the world had an early-morning freshness, school was out, and ahead of every child there stretched the limitless vista of summer.

Most fires start small; few are chosen to make an impact on history. The tragic Triangle Waist Company fire, which consumed 146 lives, most of them young girls, on March 25, 1911, was one of the latter. The fire, which swept the top three floors of the ten-story Asch building—now the Brown building of New York University—one block east of Washington Square on the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Street in New York City, acted as a catalyst on social reform. The Triangle tragedy brought together the Progressive reformer, the social worker, the urban trade unions, and Tammany behind a demand for factory legislation, thereby giving birth to a voting complex that ultimately helped to shape the New Deal.

The finest Christmas present, and the most unexpected, our country ever received was handed to us by George Washington in the dismal winter of 1776 when he crossed the Delaware and captured Trenton just as the faltering fires of the American Revolution seemed about to go out.

There were to be other hard winters before independence was won, Valley Forge among them, but none more critical than this one. Since adoption of the Declaration of Independence five months before, the bedraggled Continental Army’s road had been rutted with disasters. It had barely escaped destruction on Long Island and at White Plains and had lost 2,800 men captured at Fort Washington. Chased across New Jersey by the British regulars and their German mercenaries, it had been thinned by casualties and desertions to a few thousand hungry, half-naked diehards. Only Washington’s foresight in confiscating all the available boats before his army lied across the Delaware River at Trenton had staved off capture. At best, it seemed only a breathing spell.

On July 27, 1861, Prince Napoleon of France, cousin of Emperor Napoleon III, arrived in New York for a two-month tour of the United States, which was then just beginning the great struggle of the Civil War. In his train was an aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Camille Ferri Pisani, who wrote a series of letters describing the trip and sent them to Colonel de Franconiere, another of the Prince’s aides, who had remained in Paris.

Fable Agreed Upon A Mild Murderer History Perverted

History, it has been said, is all too often a fable agreed upon. Far underneath myth and legend, in any given period, there is a certain kernel of fact; men did thus and so, they were acted upon by this and that compelling motive, and what they did had certain concrete results. But the exact sequence of events and the chain of causation that went with that sequence have a way of getting lost; the myth-makers get busy, and a later generation may find itself consenting to a fable simply because the time when the truth might have been verified was allowed to pass.

This has a peculiar relevancy to our own times, in testimony of which there is presently available a grim and profoundly disturbing book called The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945 , written by Gerald Reitlinger.

Wives of prominent men are often overlooked, Their contributions, however vital to the domestic circle, shrink in comparison with those of their husbands outside the home. So it was with Abba May Alcott. While the names of Bronson, her husband, and of Louisa May, their daughter, are well known, who today is familiar with the unsung woman who helped to bring their careers to fruition? For years she has remained a shadowy figure, perhaps recalled as the “Marmee” of Little Women . Actually she was a heroic woman, of whom her friend Lydia Maria Child has quite rightly written, “her fortitude, her energy, her conscientious discharge of duty, her daily and hourly self sacrifice can never be duly appreciated.” Her husband’s biographer, Franklin B. Sanborn, called her the most talented writer in the family.

Sandy Welsh was hired man on my great-uncle’s farm, just below our house—the Brick Farm House farm. But to put it this way will give you quite the wrong idea of what he was to Uncle Xiram and Uncle Niram to him. For “hired man” in Vermont, particularly in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, does not mean at all what it means in some places and in some times. Sandy was an Irish boy, lovable, steady, hard-working, competent, and my Uncle Niram was a childless farmer with a very warm heart. To him, Sandy brought to the farm a breath of youth and warm vitality, which was very comforting to an old farmer who had no children of his own. And Sandy felt for “Mr. Niram” the love a nephew might feel for his uncle. Here in the country, you see, an affection can exist like that felt in a family, even when there is no blood kinship. We think it’s rather nice to have older and younger people feel that way about each other. And when I say “rather nice,” I am using Vermont understatement.