January 2011

I have just finished devouring the April 2000 travel issue, and I want to thank you for the story on the Rock City barns, which brought to mind a treasured memory. You see, I grew up in the hamlet of Flintstone, Georgia, at the foot of Lookout Mountain, directly below Rock City. In 1952, when I was six years old, my father was building an addition to our house to accommodate his growing family, so money was in short supply. We could not afford a week’s stay in Florida, or anywhere else, for that matter. It looked like no vacation that year.

I must disagree with John Steele Gordon (“The Business of America,” May/June issue). New York’s World Trade Center has been a towering success for both the city of New York and the Port Authority, which built and operates the complex.

The World Trade Center served as a catalyst for development in lower Manhattan and has been instrumental in helping to make the downtown area a residential community and major tourism draw. In addition to the world-famous Twin Towers, the complex includes one of the most successful retail malls in the country.

The Trade Center also led directly to other projects that revitalized New York City’s economy, such as Battery Park City and the World Financial Center, which were built on 25 new acres of Manhattan land created out of the fill excavated for the Trade Center.

During my trip to the United States in 1998,1 got to know your great magazine, and some months later, back in my country, Argentina, I subscribed. I share it with a friend of mine, and reading your articles, we find ourselves involved in a history that is not ours but is exciting anyway.

In the story on the Tenement Museum in the April issue, we were struck by how very similar the history of immigration in Argentina is. We have, near Buenos Aires Harbor, hundreds of tenements like those on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and they’re well preserved. Bohemians and artists are now buying them and living there, but luckily a local organization has set out conditions that will apply to anyone who wants to make changes to these buildings; it’s like a building code for historic preservation. The place, called La Boca, is in walking distance of downtown Buenos Aires.

On October 4, Dr. Benjamin Church, the chief medical officer of the Continental Army, was convicted by court-martial of “holding criminal correspondence with the enemy.” Church had supported the colonial cause ever since the Stamp Act, but all the while he had secretly backed the royal government, first with anonymous articles and then with valuable confidential information. He was exposed in late September when a letter he had written found its way into Gen. George Washington’s hands. When decoded, it proved to contain a summary of the recent Continental Congress’s acts and data on Continental troop strength, dispositions, matériel, and campaign plans. Church was thrown in jail and kept confined until 1778, when he was allowed to sail for the West Indies. His ship disappeared, and he was never heard from again.

On October 28, in Washington, D.C., the Army began proceedings in the court-martial of Gen. William ("Billy") Mitchell. For the last six years, as the Army’s assistant chief of air service, Mitchell had tirelessly evangelized military officers, government officials, and anyone else who would listen about the coming importance of airpower in warfare. Although he had many good points to make, his disregard for protocol, which some saw as more of a thirst for self-promotion, earned him a host of enemies. Their number increased as his hectoring turned into outright insubordination. At Mitchell’s trial, as at the Scopes evolution trial a few months earlier, the formal charges were uncontested, and the defense instead used the proceedings as a forum to propound its views.

On October 19, American-led United Nations forces brought the Korean War to a swift and successful conclusion by taking Pyongyang, the capital of the communist-controlled northern section of the country. As North Korean troops fled helter-skelter from their more numerous and better-armed opponents, a buoyant Gen. Douglas MacArthur declared, “The war definitely is coming to an end shortly,” predicting that American troops would be out of Korea by Christmas. Gen. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, reported that “organized resistance on any large scale has ceased to be an enemy capability.” Back home, under the headline HARD-HITTING U.M. FORCES WIND UP WAR, Life magazine wrote, “The end of the war loomed as plain as the mustache on Stalin’s face.” With resistance continuing to crumble, the magazine wrote, all that remained was to put a few final touches on “the mop-up stage of the war.”

1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

The beginnings of American history, from the Ice Age to the coming of the European explorers.

2 ENGLISH SETTLEMENT

The wellsprings of values and economies that have collided through the centuries.

3 GROWTH AND EMPIRE

Northern merchants, Southern slave society, and English dominion in North America.

4 THE COMING OF INDEPENDENCE

How the loyal English citizen became the American rebel.

5 THE NEW SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT

Figuring out how to run the fledgling nation and facing threats to its existence.

6 WESTWARD EXPANSION

The Louisiana Purchase doubles the size of the country and foments varying visions of empire.

I recall a day not too long ago when I was living in Berlin, walking down the Himmlerstrasse on my way to the Goeringplatz to celebrate Nazi Heroes Day, saying to myself, “Gee, I wonder if other vanquished peoples are still allowed to celebrate their efforts to suppress and/or eliminate whole cultures the way we are?”

Then I awoke to another day in Austin, Texas, where the streets are named after generals and statesmen of the South, state employees can take Confederate Heroes Day off, and the battle flag of the army that fought to continue the enslavement of an entire race is hung in many a restaurant.

I enjoyed your piece about the Confederate flag, but the flag that is so offensive to most people is not the flag that flew over the Confederate capitol in Montgomery or over the one in Richmond. The flag often miscalled the “Stars and Bars” was flown only in battle. The “Bonnie Blue Flag” was the unofficial first flag of the South and flew from 1860 to 1861. It is a field of blue with a single star in its center and was popularized by the song of the same name. The battle flag gained its offensive reputation during the civil rights era and was taken up as the standard of the Ku Klux Klan at that time.

For those who wish to express their Southern pride, I suggest that they fly the Bonnie Blue Flag rather than the Stars and Bars, as it is the true Confederate flag. The controversial banner rightly belongs in a museum or flying over a cemetery of Confederate dead. As a native Southerner, I feel great pride in my ancestors, who did not own slaves and gave their lives to protect their homes during the War Between the States, but I find the current use of the battle flag offensive for the same reasons as others.