January 2011

Exactly a year ago in this space, I griped at Steven Spielberg for being insufficiently cognizant of the dreadful grandeur of World War II. This was in connection with the conclusion of his Indiana Jones trilogy, when the various miracles that attended the movie’s end failed to include the suggestion that the forces of history were gathering to break the power of Nazi Germany, whose minions had been skirmishing with Indy in the desert. Well, like half the rest of America, I’ve seen Saving Private Ryan , and I’ve never been happier to eat crow.

The best folk art is “simply art,” Don Walters writes in his introduction to Spiritually Moving , a book on American folk sculpture being published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. this month. A former curator of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Walters reminds us that modern artists—the sculptor Elie Nadelman, the painters Marsden Hartley and Charles Sheeler—were among the first champions of American folk art and that what drew them was its genius for abstraction, a pared-down purity they sought in their own work. With its minimal text and extraordinary photography and design, Spiritually Moving presents—with consummate artistry—one of the finest collections of folk sculpture still in private hands.

Like most baby boomers, I grew up hearing his songs and taking them for granted. I never gave a thought to who Irving Berlin was or how he had come to write the music that flowed through our lives. In the 1970s, I saw a newspaper photograph of him singing “God Bless America” in the Nixon White House during Watergate and immediately consigned both him and the song to the “wrong” side.

When I became a singer specializing in American popular song, I still resisted his appeal—this time, not because of his politics but because of his success. By now, I knew he had more hits than any of the other songwriters, and although in my performances I’d throw in a couple of songs from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, cute rhythm numbers like “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “Cheek to Cheek,” I gravitated to writers who I didn’t think were as famous as they deserved to be, like Harry Warren and Yip Harburg and Leo Robin.

ROBERT KETTLER GAVE HIS affecting account of his visit to his father’s grave in the Summer 1996 edition of Traces , published by the Indiana Historical Society. I’ve received dozens of other articles, privately printed books, memoirs, and documents of all types, including company-or battalion-level oral histories gathered and printed by someone from the unit. This is wonderful. I’m delighted to be able to put them into the Archives at the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, where they will be open to future scholars and to descendants. I only wish they had been available when I wrote Citizen Soldiers .

The Eisenhower Center’s address is 923 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70130. Its director, Dr. Douglas Brinkley, continues actively to seek memoirs, documents, oral histories, and other material from veterans; although I’m retired, this is the project closest to my heart, and I urge all veterans to deposit copies of their material in the Archives.

—S.E.A.

For the last several years Douglas Brinkley has been working on a massive illustrated narrative, The American Heritage New History of the United States, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster. This essay is adapted from the introduction.

In the summer of 1787, a sweaty group of politicians was debating the clauses of a proposed constitution in humid Philadelphia. Endless problems reared their ugly heads: the distribution of power between large states and small states; slavery; the size of a standing army; the powers of the presidency. The framers solved—or postponed—most of these dilemmas with their famous genius for compromise. But one quandary was solved differently.

A rich young South Carolinian named Charles Pinckney proposed that the presidency should be limited to people worth $100,000—well over a million dollars in today’s money—and the federal judiciary and Congress to those worth half that sum. Pinckney did not get this idea out of thin air. In South Carolina a man had to have $10,000 to be elected to the state senate.

Watching television recently, I saw a documentary about Douglas MacArthur. It explained something that had puzzled me for more than fifty years.

Just after the Second World War, I was a young cameraman in the Philippines working for the Army Pictorial Service, a branch of the Signal Corps. One day the assignment desk in Manila directed me to the harbor to photograph some general. The general turned out to be Douglas MacArthur. In those months just after the war, everyone was trying to relax, and five-star generals were no exception. MacArthur had organized a short cruise and party on Manila Bay. At the last minute someone decided that photographs of the excursion were needed.

Out around Corregidor the assignment began to get grim. Never before had I been bothered by seasickness, but a choppy Manila Bay was doing its dirty work. Old Navy salts claimed that watching the horizon for a while would make the queasy feeling go away. Rather than embarrass the general’s guests, I reported to him to explain my problem and how I planned to solve it.

In June of 1941, just before my seventeenth birthday, Harry Goldberg, my physics instructor at Brooklyn Technical High School, asked me if I would be interested in a summer job at Columbia University. He could not tell me what the job was, but he indicated that I would be helping to build something. Being young and eager to learn (I was seventeenth in a class of five hundred graduating the following year), I accepted. Soon after school let out, I reported to a Mr. Herbert Anderson at Pupin Hall, Columbia’s physics building.

When I arrived that morning with two other teenage boys, we signed a mimeographed form promising to keep our work secret. Then we were introduced to Dr. Walter Zinn and Dr. Enrico Fermi, who was in charge.

During the golden Indian summer of 1948, I was an eleven-year-old aspiring journalist in Shell Lake, Wisconsin. My parents owned the local weekly newspaper, the Washburn County Register . I was the sports editor, printer’s devil, and errand runner. We had received an unending barrage of press releases from the local Democratic party proclaiming that President Truman would be in Spooner, whistle-stopping on his campaign across the Midwest. Mv father, a staunch Republican, refused to print such rubbish, claiming that he would not allow his paper to provide political propaganda for a discredited administration. Somehow my mother and I persuaded him that the President’s visit in a town only six miles away was a genuine news event. He insisted on rewriting the press releases, but in the end he ran the story on the front page under big headlines. Then, to our surprise, Dad announced that we would cover the President’s speech. He had been convinced by our argument that history should prevail over partisan politics.