January 2011

Frederic D. Schwarz replies: Supercilious I may be, but I’ve got nothing on Thoreau himself. For example: “I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred.” Here and in all his writings, Thoreau displays contempt for the common people—farmers, tradesmen, Irish immigrants, anyone who has better things to do than grow beans and contemplate the Bhagavad-Gita.

Frederic D. Schwarz’s supercilious put-down of Henry David Thoreau’s tax protest (“The Time Machine,” December) is a disgrace to American Heritage . Thoreau’s act of conscience served as a beacon that inspired the introduction of nonviolent civil disobedience into world politics in the mid-twentieth century, first by Mohandas K. Gandhi in India and then by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States. The movements launched by these two men bettered the lives and significantly increased the measure of freedom enjoyed by both the peoples on whose behalf they campaigned and their oppressors.

On May 3 the city of Chicago, birthplace of the skyscraper, regained a measure of civic pride when the Sears Tower topped out at 1,454 feet to become the world’s tallest building—104 feet higher than New York City’s World Trade Center. Gordon Metcalf, the then recently retired chairman of Sears, explained, “Being the largest retailer in the world, we thought we should have the largest headquarters in the world.” In fact, though, when Sears first decided to build its new headquarters six years earlier, it had had no intention of breaking any records. Early plans called for a short, squatty building, until executives decided that floors the size of several city blocks would be too hard to rent out. The design got narrower and taller until finally—right around the time the New York Mets were besting the Chicago Cubs for the National League East title—Sears decided to go all out and steal the building-league championship from Chicago’s traditional rival. The design was unveiled in July 1970.

On June 24 the Soviet Union imposed a unilateral blockade of the city of Berlin, cutting off all land access from outside the Soviet zone of occupation. The pretext was a currency reform that had just been imposed by the other three occupying powers—Britain, France, and the United States. But the real reason was a struggle over whether postwar Germany would be communist or capitalist. Berlin, though jointly occupied by the four powers, was deep inside Soviet-occupied territory. By cutting it off from the outside world, the Soviets hoped to starve into submission the parts of the city it didn’t already control.

On the back cover of the December 1997 issue of American Heritage , you mention that the illustrator J. C. Leyendecker “created the ‘Arrow Collar Man’ . . . wholly from the artist’s imagination.” One of the models for this American icon was Charles Beach, who was Mr. Leyendecker’s lover for nearly fifty years.

The Arrow Collar Man was the male equivalent of the Gibson girl. No publisher would hesitate to acknowledge that Charles Dana Gibson’s wife was one of his models. Why is it so difficult to make public that a gay man could find equal inspiration in the person who shared his life? The most unfortunate aspect of your lapse is that it is yet another example of the systematic erasing of gay history from the collective memory.

Rachel Snyder seems to so distance, in the general sense, the Australian couple accompanying her in My Lai that one would have to suspect she is unaware that Australians also fought in her “Vietnam-American” War.

Although a little closer to the period than the author (meaning I grew up watching it on TV), I was not over there. But I’d like to make a comment on her outstanding piece.

I believe that the reference to this episode in our history should be the “Vietnam War,” not the “Vietnam-American War.” We were, after all, allied with the government of South Vietnam. No one ever refers to the Korean War as the Korean-American War. It’s not fair to those who honorably served over there to treat them any differently—in any respect. Personally I feel a great debt to those who were there, no more and no less than to those who served in any conflict that our nation has engaged in.

On May 3, in the cases of Shelley v. Kraemer and Hurd v. Hodge , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants in real estate deeds were not legally enforceable. Such covenants—which usually prevented homeowners from selling their houses to nonwhites—were not illegal in themselves, since private agreements were beyond the reach of civil rights laws. But under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Court ruled, the apparatus of state or federal government could not be used to enforce them, because that would involve the government in an act of discrimination. The decision, written by Chief Justice Fred Vinson, was endorsed by a margin of 6 to 0. Three justices recused themselves from the case, presumably because they owned houses in restricted neighborhoods (one of which barred blacks, Jews, and Persians, among others).

On May 4 New York State’s legislature repealed the Mullan-Gage Act, which had incorporated the provisions of Prohibition into state law. Legally, repealing the act meant little; the Eighteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution still outlawed the sale or possession of liquor. As a practical matter, however, the repeal placed the main burden of enforcing Prohibition on about 250 federal agents instead of 25,000 state and local officers. In much of the state Prohibition would effectively be dead except as an excuse to collect graft. New York was not the first state to repeal its enforcement laws, but as the nation’s most populous state, it carried the greatest weight.

After America declared war on Spain in late April, heroic acts filled the newspapers almost daily. There was Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet at Manila; Schley’s victory at Santiago; Hobson’s valiant scuttling of the Merrimack ; and of course the bloody land battles at Las Guasìmas, El Caney, and San Juan. In a brief war chock-full of glorious (or at least glorified) exploits, the least heroic incident must surely be the Navy’s bloodless capture of Guam.

On June 4 the cruiser USS Charleston and three troop transports sailed from Honolulu to reinforce Dewey at Manila. In his instructions to the Charleston , Secretary of the Navy John D. Long had added (like a wife telling her husband to pick up a quart of milk while walking the dog), “On your way, you are hereby directed to stop at the Spanish Island of Guam.” Capt. Henry Glass was told to capture the island, destroy any Spanish vessels and fortifications, and take prisoners. “These operations . . . should not occupy more than one or two days,” Long predicted.