January 2011

The first major international aviation meet in the United States opened at belmont Park, a race track near New York City, in October, 1910, on a surge of sensational aeronautic news. Early in the month, newspapers told of leading fliers flexing their wings at Hawthorne race track, near Chicago, for a race of a thousand miles, Chicago to New York, for a price of $25,000 offered by the New York Times and the Chicago Post . As the aviators made their practice flights at Hawthorne, spectators could sec for the first time in Chicago’s history as many as three planes in the air at once.

The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city. From the beginning its political values and ideas were of necessity shaped by country life. The early American politician, the country editor, who wished to address himself to the common man, had to draw upon a rhetoric that would touch the tillers of the soil; and even the spokesman of city people knew that his audience had been in very large part reared upon the farm.

But what the articulate people who talked and wrote about farmers and farming—the preachers, poets, philosophers, writers, and statesmen—liked about American farming was not, in every respect, what the typical working farmer liked. For the articulate people were drawn irresistibly to the noncommercial, non-pecuniary, self-sufficient aspect of American farm life. ‘To them it was an ideal.

After the death of Edgar Allan Poe in 1849, 1819 his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, turned to the sale of romance by trying to convince certain ladies that they were the inspirations for Poe’s poems. In actual fact, she knew that “Annabel Lee” had been inspired by her own daughter Virginia, Poe’s wife, and that “To Helen” honored two other people—Poe’s foster mother, Mrs. Frances Allan, and the mother of a boyhood playmate. All three of these women, by now, were dead.

But Mrs. Clemm never nerved herself to brace the woman depicted in “Lenore”—Mrs. Elmira Royster Shelton, who was Poe’s first sweetheart when he was a boy and who represented the final haven when he returned to Richmond at the end of his tormented mortal journey.

Recently I went down to Cape Ann and stood on the Stage Rocks overlooking Gloucester Day. There were a few sailboats in sight and occasionally a fishing trawler would round the Dog Bar Breakwater. A strong odor of fish hangs over the town as it has for several centuries, but the air over the Stage Rocks was clean and the visibility was excellent. I stayed there for some time, trying to visualize the bay as it must have appeared in August, 1817, when something occurred that put this spot in all the newspapers of the world.

The White House is much on our minds today. Whether we look ahead to the next election, or back to September 24, 1955, the day of President Eisenhower’s heart attack, we are more aware than we we have been for years of the central position the presidency occupies in our scheme of things.

The importance of this noble office, both as instrument and symbol of American democracy, can be most accurately measured by making a list of the major functions the President performs in the American system of government. With the passing of generations the President has become a majestic Pooh-Bah who combines in his person all these essential and delicate roles:

Chief of State , the ceremonial head of the government of the United States, the man who does for the American people what the Queen does for the people of Britain.

From Washington to Lincoln

In the 167 years since George Washington was his first inaugurated, the presidency has risen greatly in power and prestige. The chart on these pages, continuing onto the following two pages, is an attempt to present this rise in graphic form.

Oregon was not a land for Negro slaves. It was settled by a little bit of everybody—by northerners, by southerners, and by folk from the border states who could feel the emotional pull of both sides simultaneously—and by all ordinary logic it should have been the last part of the United States to feel the pulling and hauling of the slavery crisis during the 1850’s and 1860’s. But if it was remote it was still America—quintessential America, in a way, since it shared everything with everybody. Therefore it was an interesting battleground for the contest of pro- and antislavery forces during the years just preceding the outbreak of the Civil War.

Here, in other words, is another essential part of the story of the Oregon Country, a part usually overlooked but none the less vital in the telling of the story of how America grew and shaped itself.

The story of human activity in the Pacific Northwest does not, of course, begin with the arrival of the white man. The Indians of the region had a peculiarly rich culture of their own, dating far back into the mists of prehistory, and in a good many ways their society was unlike the modern conception of how the noble red man lived and behaved when he was on his own. A detailed, scholarly examination of this culture is provided by Philip Drucker of the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Smithsonian Institution, in Indians of the Northwest Coast .

Primarily this is a handbook intended to present the cultural background for the fine collection of Indian specimens and artifacts on display by the American Museum of Natural History; its approach is scientific, and it is not in all ways ideally adapted to the purposes of the general reader. But it does help to round out the picture for anyone interested in the great Northwest, and it gives an interesting account of a group of Indian tribes who differed radically from the more familiar eastern and Plains Indians.

The illustrations in this portfolio are reproduced through the courtesy of. Irving S. Olds, lornier chairman of the board of the U.S. Steel Corporation and outstanding collector of naval prints, and with the assistance of Marry Shaw Newman.

The Fabulous River Free Soil and Free Men Before the Explorers