January 2011

While the antiquarian still coos over many a useless relic of the past, the American miller and his mill have often been forgotten. Like the farmer and the barn builder, his name is seldom recorded; but his place in the fabric of our history is distinct.

While the antiquarian still coos over many a useless relic of the past, the American miller and his mill have often been forgotten. Like the farmer and the barn builder, his name is seldom recorded; but his place in the fabric of our history is distinct.

The miller was America’s first industrial inventor. He was builder, banker, businessman and host to the countryside. When highways were no wider than today’s bridle paths, the first good roads were built to the mills. Where there was a mill site, there was a nucleus for a town. America had so many Millvilles, Milltowns, Milfords and other towns named after original mills, that the Post Office Department sponsored the changing of many such names to stop the confusion.

The old-time frontier camp meeting has had a bad press, in our generation. It is usually held up as a horrible example of the emotional excesses of a crude people whose religious impulses were all tangled up with sex hunger, and amateur psychologists have had a field day with it.

Balance is restored by Charles A. Johnson, with his sympathetic and discerning The Frontier Camp Meeting . Mr. Johnson sees the frontier meeting as the end product of a number of forces, not least of which was the desperate need for the steadying influence of religion in a semi-civilized backwoods region. It grew also out of the courageous and devoted work of the old-time circuit riders, out of the need felt by isolated folk for communion with one another, and finally out of the forest itself, with its dangers and its distances and its unrelenting pressure.

In other words, the camp meeting served a solid purpose in the civilizing of the frontier. Here is a thoughtful, well-written book which effectively answers the debunkers.

Few battles in American history have been more extensively analyzed and described than the tragic engagement on the Little Big Horn River in Montana, where George Armstrong Custer and five troops of the 7th Cavalry were killed. All of the evidence is in, apparently; the archives have been combed with painstaking thoroughness, and seemingly every human being who was within miles of the place at the time has told and retold his story, often enough in several versions. There is full agreement about practically nothing connected with this affair—except, of course, that it was one whale of a fight.

Yet there is room, it would seem, for one more book on the subject, and Professor Stewart has written it—a good one, assembled with vast thoroughness and attention to detail, which attempts to get the whole business into focus by centering its attention neither on Custer himself nor on the actual battle but on the campaign as a whole and what led up to it.

This wonderfully entertaining account of the most remarkable of all coastal steamboat lines was first published in 1937, the year in which the line, then 91, suddenly stopped running. Now Mr. McAdam, unofficial historian of the Fall River Line, has revised and enlarged the rare early edition. There are many more pictures and the narrative has been brought down to the present, all with charm and authority. The story of other Long Island Sound operations is included, together with the eventual fate of all the old floating palaces themselves. Some puffed on a few more years in other waters, others went with unseemly haste to the scrap yards (lest the courts change their minds and order resumption of service), a few perished gloriously in World War II.

The final truth of history is an evasive and a many-sided thing. It is what really happened, and it is what men have thought really happened; it is what men did, and the emotions that moved them while they were doing it; it is the hard facts that lie under the gloss of romance, and it is also the gloss itself—for the act of dreaming can be as important as the thing dreamed of. It is infinitely complex, a house of many mansions, something that never quite becomes fixed.

So the story is never really finished. Each generation comes to its own conclusions, and the ultimate meaning has a way of lying, half-hidden, just over the top of the next hill. So “the lesson of history” remains fluid; perhaps, in the end, it is nothing much more definite than the demonstration that human life is a many-splendored thing of infinite variety and an all but incomprehensible complexity.

The Civil War: the Truth and the Legend Floating Palaces Too Many Indians Camp Meeting Days

In the summer of my junior year at Purdue University, I learned that there was a job open in Chicago for a young man who would be willing to work at $10 a week on a magazine called The Western Electrician . I went to Chicago and took the job. That was in the summer of 1907. When I opened up the desk which they assigned to me, I found in it a number of papers of one Lee De Forest. Lee De Forest had previously had the same job and was at that time earning, apparently, about $10 a week. But he had made it a condition that he would work on the magazine job only half time and spend the other half time working in the laboratories of Armour Institute. It was during those three days a week, while he was living on the $10 a week paid him by The Western Electrician for his editorial work, that he completed the experiments which led to the invention of the audion, or three-element radio tube, which has been the foundation of all of our radio industry to date.

(This continues Mr. Bryson’s recollections.)

After I had been in New York about a year—I think it was about 1935—George Denny of the Town Hall got the idea of the Town Meeting of the Air . It was a great forward step in radio. Every other proposal for free-for-all political discussion on radio had been met with jeers by the powers that be—it wasn’t safe, it couldn’t be done, and so on.

I remember the first broadcast. I went down. There was no clear issue. The thing was a series of interesting political speeches, but it wasn’t a very good broadcast.

After one or two of these Denny called me up and asked me to have lunch with him and talk over the Town Meeting of the Air . He said he was discontented because the questioning was too inert and nothing much happened when the speeches were over. His whole idea was that there should be a real open forum of the air.