The great illustrator J. C. Leyend jcker (1874-1951) created Christmas covers for The Saturday Evening Post whose rubicund Santas were the absolute embodiment of Christmas for generations of children—and, indeed, for their parents too. This one ran in 1923. If Leyendecker was good at showing what Santa Claus should look like, he was equally compelling showing a generation of young men what they should look like. He created the “Arrow Collar Man,” who, though summoned wholly from the artist’s imagination, was real enough to the public to inspire a response perhaps unprecedented for any painter a flood of fan letters and gifts, marriage proposals, and notes threatening suicide—seventeen thousand of them in one month alone early in the 1920s. Among those fans was a fluent young illustrator named Norman Rockwell, who later became a close friend of the older artist, tt is fitting, then, that the first retrospective of LeyendeckeKs works should be mounted at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where it will be on view through May 25, 1998.
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Your story of turn-of-the-century Butte (April) had a special poignancy for me. My grandmother, who recently died, was born to a Finnish family there in 1907. Unlike those who remained behind, though, she did not preserve the ethnic culture amid which she must have lived during the first three years of her life. Her case was only one of the many tragic situations that the rough-and-tumble days you describe produced. She later was adopted and left Butte about 1911, after her mother, who had nine children and was a laundress, had been committed to an insane asylum.
My grandmother’s memories of Montana’s copper country were unpleasant, and she claimed to remember little. Indeed, the only reason that we know she was born and lived in Butte, or even that her parents were Finnish miners, was that my uncle thumbed through old Montana records to establish her biological heritage. She herself did not consider this heritage important. More significant to her was her heritage in California as an American whose sons pursued higher degrees and middle-class lives.
Among the entrants in the presidential election of 1872 was Victoria Woodhull, the most flamboyant, outspoken, and uncompromising feminist of her day. Woodhull, running on her own Equal Rights ticket, was an Ohio-born faith healer who had moved to New York City in 1868 with her sister Tennessee Claflin, on advice, she said, from the spirit of Demosthenes. They quickly became Wall Street’s first female stockbrokers and began promoting radical causes. In 1871 they tried to vote in a municipal election and were rebuffed, but in 1872 they never even got the chance. On Election Day the sisters were in jail because of a story they had published in their political journal/scandal sheet, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly .
On November 2 the citizens of Boston took a giant step along the path to rebellion by establishing a committee of correspondence to exchange information with other Massachusetts towns. The move had been prompted by the royal government’s latest attempt to assert its authority, this time over the judicial system. Since 1701 Massachusetts judges had been paid by the colonists themselves, but reports were circulating about a new plan to pay Superior Court judges from the royal treasury. On October 28 the Boston town meeting resolved to ask Gov. Thomas Hutchinson if the rumors were true. He refused to answer. Two days later it asked Hutchinson to convene the legislature. That request was rebuffed as well. Then on November 2, in an all-day meeting at Faneuil Hall, the freemen of Boston appointed a twenty-one-member committee of correspondence to bypass the governor’s obstructionism.
When his affluent neighbors in suburban Connecticut accused him of using them as characters in his New Yorker cartoons, Charles Saxon quickly assured them that he was “really satirizing himself. Since he seemed to lead the same sort of life they did, shared the same interests, and belonged to the same country club, they found the explanation acceptable. Even when their exact words appeared in his cartoon gag lines, they tended not to recognize themselves. “The people who said them don’t remember them,” Saxon once confided to a friend. “They don’t realize they’re being pointed to.”
In the July/August issue Margarete Plischke describes coaching John F. Kennedy for his famous June 1963 speech in Berlin. She doesn’t mention, however, that when the President called out, “ Ich bin ein Berliner ,” he was not stating to the crowd that he was a citizen of Berlin as was the intention but rather that he was a jelly doughnut. Using ein (a) changed the meaning entirely. A Berliner is a sweet pastry, and the result was much like saying, “I am a Danish,” rather than “I am Danish.”
Hats off to Fred Andersen for his finely detailed celebration of Yankee Doodle Dandy , James Cagney, and George M. Cohan (July/August). Andersen gets so much of this grand story right, from crediting Cohan with inventing American musical comedy to noting that the great song-and-dance man really was born on the Fourth of July.
However, Andersen is wrong to suggest that James Cagney made up the memorable scene in which Cohan tweaks and teases his theatrical rival Eddie Foy. This verbal joust came nearly verbatim from an article that appeared in the Brooklyn-Eagle on December 23,1907. The screenwriter Robert Buckner found the old clipping in April 1941 when he interviewed Cohan and consulted the splendid Robinson Locke collection of theatrical scrapbooks at the New York Public Library. Buckner’s transcription of this dialogue appears in his notes for the screenplay, which today are preserved by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research.