January 2011

I have to admit to not feeling sympathy for the “white settlers” who inhabit the “white towns” in the middle of Indian land. Often they own the only stores and gas stations, the only pharmacies and banks. They can charge exorbitant prices on every item because they know we have no choice about where we can buy our toilet paper and food. I have been in white-run stores where the clerks follow you around and call Indians thieves—yet aren’t too proud to take our money.

I grew up with a biased view against white society as a whole, and I do what I can to survive in your world. I admit to feeling resentment at times, but what would you feel if your world had been stolen from you, your life ripped apart? Probably just as much forgiveness and understanding as we do.

Juanita Martin Columbus, Ohio

ON DECEMBER 23, 1983, THE LEAD EDITORIAL IN THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION began, “Leo Frank has been lynched a second time.” The first lynching had occurred almost 70 years earlier, when Leo Frank, convicted murderer of a t13-year-old girl, had been taken from prison by a band of vigilantes and hanged from a tree in the girl’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia. The lynching was perhaps unique, for Frank was not black, but a Jew. Frank also is widely considered to have been innocent of his crime. Thus, the second “lynching” was the refusal of Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles to exonerate him posthumously.

Frank’s trial, in July and August 1913, has been called “one of the most shocking frame-ups ever perpetrated by American law-and-order officials.” The case became, at the time, a cause célèbre in which the injustices created by industrialism, urban growth in Atlanta, and fervent anti-Semitism all seemed to conspire to wreck one man.

IT IS RALPH WALDO EMERSON whom we most commonly accuse of having coined the saying: “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” But in his Journal, 1855, we find this entry on “common fame”: “I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

Indeed, it was only in 1889, seven years after Emerson’s death, that his admirer Sarah Yule, in Borrowings, claimed she’d once heard him speak a catchier version of the thought: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I WAS WORKING in the American Heritage book division side by side with our (now) senior editor Jane Colihan, the two of us younger, of course, and darker-haired, and glummer. This last was the case because we were fighting a losing battle, and the losing was the more bitter for the fact that our company had not only started the fight, but had won it for years.

The fight was selling illustrated histories by direct mail—which meant that, rather than exposing your book to the infinite perils of critics, distributors, and stores, you worked up a compelling brochure, mailed it to potential customers, and persuaded them to commit in advance.

For a while, American Heritage was the only company to do this. But now, we had been joined in the field (I’ll drop the military metaphor before I have to write the word routed ) by such formidable competitors as Time Inc., which was not only putting out splendid illustrated histories but doing so by the series.

MARK TWAIN WAS BORN ALMOST EXACTLY a century before I was into a small-town Mississippi Valley culture that, despite the centennial difference, bore remarkable resemblances to my own. I took his work to my heart at an early age and have retained my regard for the best of it ever since. Shortly before my sixtieth birthday I returned to Life on the Mississippi for the first time since high school in my little town in Mississippi. It rings even more striking and true for me now, not least, I think, because I too became a writer, and I learned immeasurably from him. If good literature embraces the dreams of young readers over the many years, then Mark Twain reappears to me dreamlike as I age; he was magic to me as a fledgling writer, and still is.

THE SIXTIES HAVE BEEN MISUNDER- stood. It was not a radical decade, as the term radical is commonly used in connection with those years. It was not a decade of the left ascendant. Rampant, perhaps, but not ascendant. Rather, the decade was radicalizing, which, subsequent decades have shown, is different. Politically, the sixties invigorated the right more than the left. But of course politics is not everything. In fact, three decades down the road, the nation’s political discourse may be driven by conservatives, but they, although by many measures triumphant, seem aggrieved because politics seems peripheral to, and largely impotent against, cultural forces and institutions permeated with what conservatives consider the sixties sensibilities.

IT WAS A FUNERAL TO REMEMBER. The rain had been pelting for hours when the mourners gathered in St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church, in the Sunset district, but now the skies cleared as four National Guard helicopters clattered overhead in a “missing man” formation ” as scores of dignitaries—governors and representatives, senators and aides from Sacramento and Washington, Los Angeles and New York—stared gravely at the casket, draped in the red and white state flag. It was February 17, 1996, and Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown, the liberal former governor of California, was being buried in San Francisco.

The mourners were burying more than a man; they were burying a political era. The decades-long liberal consensus that had begun with the New Deal had faded years before. But Brown’s passing offered friends and foes alike a chance to reflect upon that time.

It was almost like the week of the Miss America Pageant: celebrities everywhere, stars of the Democratic party leading processions up and down the famed Boardwalk, their entourages surrounding them, an excited press walking backward, focusing cameras and making notes.

Here came Hubert Humphrey, the leading contender for the vice-presidential nomination to run with the anointed Lyndon Johnson in November (1964) following his coronation in the vast Convention Hall, where Miss America is crowned each fall. A huge group of admirers, politicians, and the media crowded Senator Humphrey as he strode the venerable boards, heedless of the hot New Jersey summer sun and of the gigantic billboard above his head that advised, “Goldwater: In your heart, you know he’s right!” Under that legend, a strip sign placed by the Democrats added, “Yes, far right!”

My mother loved parades and early on imbued me with a love of same. An incident at one sticks in my mind. I believe it was in 1926 or 1927. I can’t be sure as I was only a small boy then.

While standing on the curb in Newark, New Jersey watching a Decoration Day parade pass by, I found myself near a group of seven or eight ancient Civil War veterans. I looked over their beards, their blue Grand Army of the Republic coats and broadbrimmed campaign hats, and I wished I could grow a beard like one of theirs. One old soldier called, “Sonny, come over here,” and “Sonny” obediently did. He said, “Shake my hand,” and I did. “Now,” he said, “you’re only two handshakes from the Revolution.” When he was about my age, six or seven, he had shaken hands with a veteran of that war.

I fully intend someday to pass on this membership in an exclusive club to another young hand. He’ll be three shakes from the great event. We certainly are a young country.

--John Clark Alberts, Lt. Col., U.S. Air Force (Ret)