January 2011

Henry Steele Commager, one of the greatest American historians and a friend to this magazine for many years, died at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts on March 2, at the great age of 95. If you studied American history in this country at any time between, say, 1930 and 1970, you probably used The Growth of the American Republic, which he wrote with Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard, as a basic textbook. With the dear friend of this magazine Professor Allan Nevins of Columbia, he wrote America: The Story of a Free People (1942), which became a bestseller, as well as The American Mind (1951), which many think his best work, and The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment, which The New York Times described as a refutation of economic determinism.

As a teacher of history and the son of a PT boater, I became fascinated with the story of the PT boats at a very young age. Unfortunately, Dad died in 1981 and I never really had the chance to uncover what the PT experience was all about until 1992, when I held a reunion at my home for the men he served with aboard PT-195. It was then that ] came to learn firsthand about the courage and valor of these boats and the sailors they served. But perhaps more revealing was the intimate bond developed among the men that neither time nor distance had broken. That reunion six years ago motivated me to compile a fifty-page oral history of PT-195, which I can now say is complete thanks to your article—and to the picture on page 68 of the July/August issue that featured PT-195.

AMERICAN HERITAGE ON TV: This fall and winter the History Channel will introduce a new program, American Heritage Presents Great Minds of American History , in which some of the nation’s most esteemed historians discuss crucial moments and movements in America’s past with the interviewer Roger Mudd. It will be shown on five evenings, beginning on September 25, with Stephen E. Ambrose on World War II and the postwar years, and ending in March. The other historians are: Gordon S. Wood, on the Revolutionary era, James M. McPherson, on the Civil War period, Richard White, on Westward expansion, and David McCullough, on the industrial age. Readers can direct e-mail to the editors at mail@americanheritage.com. My Father’s War Henry Steele Commager

Who are the wealthiest Americans across all U.S. history? That question led us to begin a wideranging exploration that became our 1996 book The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates—A Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present . In it we ranked wealthy Americans since the start of the nation. Among the surprises was that George Washington (No. 59) and Ben Franklin (No. 86) turn up there. Throughout U.S. history there have been attempts to define the financial pecking order, from the lists of wealthy New Yorkers by Moses Yale Beach in the 1840s to the guest list of the annual 400-person Astor ball that later defined New York society and on to today’s systematic rankings in FORBES. Yet there had never been a list across the history of the nation.

I can’t think of another magazine that relies as heavily as this one does upon its readers to be its contributors, as well. The “My Brush With History” feature is a vigorous adolescent now— 13 years old, with a sunny future—and we’ve been publishing the photographs of “Readers’ Album” since the 1970s. The picture on the opposite page was submitted to that department a year ago, but I hijacked it for a “Frontispiece” because it was of particular interest to me. The little boy peering gravely from the breech of the naval gun is having his centenary this year, and his birthday has drawn less attention than I think it deserves.

Years ago, when I was fresh out of college and trying to learn the intricacies of the American Heritage Picture Collection, I left my post one afternoon to timidly approach Bruce Catton and ask him a question: If he were forced to choose just one book about the Civil War, what would it be? Was there any such book? Yes, he said, there was; it was called John Brown’s Body.

Imagine the uproar that would ensue if a columnist for The New York Times —one of the most prestigious posts in American journalism—were to include in a column a flat-out bigoted statement of the all-X-are-Y variety. Fortunately we have reached a point in this country where it is almost inconceivable that such a statement would appear in such a venue.

Or have we?

“In business, of course,” Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times on November 21, 1993, “it is dollars above all. If you have to step over corpses to collect your cash, so be it. Money excuses everything.” In other words, all businesspeople are money-mad and ruthless. Now Mr. Herbert surely did not mean to say that his own employers—who try their level best to see to it that the New York Times Company is as profitable as possible—would step over dead bodies to maximize that profit. But that is exactly what he did say, by converting an ugly stereotype into a universal truth.

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

1839-1937

After graduating from high school in 1855, he worked as a bookkeeper and clerk in Cleveland, Ohio. Amid the Allegheny oil boom of the 1860s, his dealings in commodities led naturally to refining and an operation that in 1870 emerged as Standard Oil, of which he was named president. It was at first only one of many small outfits, but under his aegis it absorbed most of its competitors, and by 1881 it controlled about 90 percent of the nation’s oil business, benefiting from what many considered unfair advantages, such as railroad rebates. In 1882 Standard Oil invented the trust to get around laws against owning businesses in more than one state; in 1892 the Standard Oil trust was theoretically broken up as an illegal monopoly, but it survived until 1911 by the rise of another novelty, the holding company. Rockefeller retired in 1897. By 1922 he had given away about a billion dollars to family members and charity and kept only about twenty million for himself.

ANDREW CARNEGIE

1835-1919

The bright light in my eyes came from the flashlight of the wake-up man, Sgt. “Rosy” Roseborough, for the 26th time that spring of 1944. Rosy said, “It’s two-thirty, Lieutenant. Time to rise and shine.” This was his nice way of saying, “It’s time to go to war again.”

Our body clocks were set for 3:30, the normal wake-up time. I usually went to sleep idly wondering if tomorrow might be my last day on earth. Midway through the fifty missions we needed to fly before we could go home, we had lost eight of the seventeen original crews the 763d Bomb Squadron had brought over from Savannah.

Fifteen minutes after wake-up the half-dozen crews eating breakfast looked lost in the spacious mess hall. Only six “up” today, all from our squadron. Why?

If the 20th century has taught us anything about economics, it is that free markets work better than any other kind. Heaven knows that virtually every possible substitute has been tried in the eighty years since World War I ended, and they have, without exception, failed to work. Indeed, the more they have departed from the free market model, the more they have failed to create wealth and improve living standards.

There’s a very simple reason free markets work. They automatically send signals—billions of them every day—to buyers and sellers alike, keeping them informed about supply and demand. The buyers and sellers then adjust their own actions, and these in turn affect the supply and demand. This all-pervasive economic feedback mechanism acts something like the governor on a steam engine, making the market run smoothly, while it helps allocate resources with an efficiency no bureaucracy could hope to match.