January 2011

When the Supreme ruled that President Clinton was not immune during his term of office from Paula Jones’s suit charging alleged sexual harassment, I thought at once of writing a column about the accusations of sexual misconduct brought against previous Presidents. But I discarded the idea largely because the major stories were probably overfamiliar to those even passingly acquainted with presidential history. They begin with Thomas Jefferson’s supposed fathering of children by his slave Sally Hemings and run on through various alleged or actual cases of bastardy and adultery involving some half-dozen other Chief Executives.

Instead, I began a more sober essay on other cases in which the Supreme Court ruled on the extent of a sitting President’s immunity from the legal obligations of ordinary citizens. But Sally Hemings kept coming back into my mind and would not go away.

This trio, with their finely waxed mustaches, may look like performers in a Sigmund Romberg operetta, but in fact, in the last days of the 1917 Russian Revolution, they were all that stood between Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia, and the fury of the people. The photo of the czar’s guards came to us from Erdman Heinrich Schlender, of St. Joseph, Michigan, and in the accompanying letter he explains why it is a treasured family memento: “Father and Mother arrived in America with two baby boys, one of whom was me. The guard on the right was our mother’s brother, Heinrich Zindler.

No less the Corsican clansman than the French military genius, Napoleon the Great saw himself as the eminence of a family of rulers placed by his armies atop thrones, his brothers made kings—Joseph in Spain, Louis in Holland—his sister Caroline the queen of Naples, other relatives princes and viceroys.

The irresponsible and undisciplined youngest of the family, Jérôme, “Fifi” to all, was a problem. A little scoundrel, Napoleon said. Nevertheless, Jérôme was a Bonaparte and as such must fulfill his dictated destiny, which was to wed an ancient-line princess and become a king. So, it came as a horrible shock to Napoleon when he learned that the 19-year-old had gone and married an American girl.

On November 13, in Ozawa v. United States , the Supreme Court ruled that Japanese immigrants were not eligible to become American citizens. The plaintiff, Takao Ozawa, was a native Japanese who had moved to Hawaii in the mid-1890s from California. In 1914 he had applied for citizenship and been turned down. In his lawsuit Ozawa pointed out that he was well educated and spoke excellent English; that his children (who, being American-born, were automatically citizens) attended American public schools; and that he had refrained from teaching them the Japanese language, culture, or religion. No matter, said the court. Since Ozawa was not white, he could not be naturalized.

T. Willard Hunter’s letter in the September issue makes me want to shout, “Oh, come off it!” Charles Lindbergh did not have a medal “thrust” on him by Hermann Goering three weeks before the “horrendous anti-Semitic pogroms . . . started” with Kristallnacht in November 1938. For five years Jews had been beaten, humiliated, boycotted, and expropriated as part of the public, ongoing program of the Nazi government to purify Germany racially. It was no secret to anyone who read the newspapers. For three more years Lindbergh continued to oppose American efforts to aid the Allies in resisting the Nazi war machine and openly stated his belief that interventionism was largely the creation of the Jews. It is “misleading” to pretend anything other than that he knew exactly what statement he was making by accepting the decoration. “Lindy” may have been a hero, a great aviator, and a patriot after December 7, 1941, but he was also an admirer of the discipline, order, and public loyalty of fascist regimes and blind to their coercive side.

Photographs by Robert Benson

Gene Smith visits and revisits a place resonant with significance personal, local, and national, a place that tempered the Gilded Age’s ostentation with a boisterous egalitarianism, a place where King George’s hopes for an end to his colonial rebellion came to grief, a place where generations of Americans sought healing waters or instantaneous wealth, a place that has gone through bitter times yet still draws the attention of the world every August and offers superb natural beauty (along with an exuberant architectural legacy) the year round, a place very much aware that its present fortunes depend largely on the imaginative exploitation of its past

From the very beginning, American Heritage has viewed history as inseparable from the place where it unfolded. Indeed, the first words in the first issue of the magazine were not about a famous person or a great event; they were about a place. Bruce Catton described contemporary Gettysburg to connect his readers with what had happened there almost a century before. The present place made the past more accessible.

In ordinary speech, pragmatism connotes practicality, commonsense, feet on the ground—virtues Americans like to think of as specifically American virtues. One thing the term does not connote is philosophical speculation. When we say someone is pragmatic, we are usually implying that he or she is not given to abstract rumination. But pragmatism is also the name of a particular type of philosophy. It was first introduced publicly nearly a hundred years ago, in 1898, by William James, and for several decades, arguments over it dominated American philosophy. Then, in the 1930s, it went into a long period of eclipse, almost forgotten amid the emergence of new philosophical schools and theoretical paradigms. But since 1980 it has made an astonishing comeback. Legal writers, literary critics, historians, political theorists, and educators—not to mention philosophers—are starting to call themselves pragmatists. And by that term they mean to invoke the philosophical tradition of a century ago.