January 2011

In his conversation with Nicholas Lemann, Dinesh D’Souza cites three people—David Duke, Mark Fuhrman, and Jared Taylor—as evidence that racism is still a problem in America. Everyone has heard of the first two, but who on earth is Jared Taylor?

I am the editor of a newsletter on race relations called American Renaissance . In 1994 I hosted a conference on the theme of “Race and American Civilization,” and Mr. D’Souza was one of many subscribers who attended. In The End of Racism he describes the conference in such lurid terms that at one point in the conversation Mr. Lemann remarks: “There’s a chilling scene in the book where you go to a racist group’s convention and they say all sorts of scary things.” Mr. Lemann did not know, because Mr. D’Souza did not write, that of the eleven speakers at the conference, two were syndicated columnists, four were Ph.D.s, one was a Jesuit priest, and four, including one orthodox rabbi, were Jews.

“The End of Racism?,” the interview of Dinesh D’Souza by Nicholas Lemann (February/March issue), seems out of place in American Heritage for two reasons. First, it’s not so much history as it is a debate over a current social-political issue. Fine, I can deal with that; history doesn’t have to be ancient history to qualify as such. But second, assuming the quaint principle of reasonable objectivity still has some application in the study of history, Mr. Lemann clearly has no intention of seriously exploring—for the readers’ benefit—the positions of Mr. D’Souza. Instead, he sets out from the beginning to discredit his subject. In the introduction to the interview, Mr. Lemann says Mr. D’Souza’s book “keeps going to ground as agitprop.” That, along with other more oblique slurs, sums up his opinion of Mr. D’Souza’s work. Paraphrased: “Dear Reader, I’m going to ask this racist propagandist some questions, but be sure you understand from the outset that he is beyond the pale and not to be believed.”

Before rock stardom loomed in kids’ dreams, most little boys yearned to live the life of a cowboy. Virginia Atchinson, of Enid, Oklahoma, sent us this turn-of-the-century photo of her father, RoIlie Waterbury, happily dissolute in a Colorado pool hall, and told of his brush with Western adventure. He is “the thirteen-year-old on the right wearing the striped galluses,” she writes.

“Rollie’s father had made the run into the Cherokee Strip land opening in Oklahoma and staked a claim. Six years later he died, leaving a widow with ten children, the youngest twelve days old. They lived in a two-room sod house, and Rollie became the man of the family.

Our Racism Debate Our Racism Debate Our Racism Debate Patton’s Tanks

Subscription rate and membership to the Classic Trailer and Motorhome Club (P.O. Box 43737, 615 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106), $21.00 per year. CODE: LTH-1

TEARDROPS! EXCLAIMS THE COVER OF issue number two of Lost Highways Quarterly , a magazine devoted to the history of trailers. The teardrop trailer, just eight to twelve feet long and made of wood and Masonite, is but one of the many vintage vehicles that the co-editors Todd and Kristin Kimmell are eager to preserve—and to show off. The Kimmells were already antique-car enthusiasts when they became interested in old trailers, and as their letters column attests, they are not alone. Correspondence pours in from people who have collected trailers for years or are just beginning, and many are anxious for tips on how to locate the trailer of their dreams.

Rustic Replicas, Inc. (7606 West Vine Street, River Forest, IL 60305), log cabin kit, $45.00. CODE: RUS-1

THE FOLK ARTIST GEORGE DE MILLE wanted to re-create on a smaller scale the craft and difficulty of pioneer cabin building, so he devised a roughhewn assembly kit for the serious child or adult who might otherwise be piecing together model battleships. It requires the same meticulousness as gluing tiny plastic pieces and the same tools you might use to make a Pinewood Derby racer. The thirteen-by-thirteen-inch cabin’s materials arrive in a thirty-pound box. Its miniature pine logs need to be whittled, sawed, and fitted at the ends. There are planks and timbers for a modest porch, a bag of plaster of Paris to seal the walls, and a bag of stones for the chimney. Cedar shingles finish it off.

directed by Mike Shea , Shanachie Entertainment, SO minutes, $19.95. CODE: SHA-4

WINDSOR PRISON’S GRIM AND colorful story is dwarfed by the centuries-long history of the modern prison itself. Every facet of incarceration is covered in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society , edited by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (Oxford University Press, 489 pages, $39.95, CODE: OUP-14 )—from Roman underground prisons to French penal colonies, methods and philosophies of rehabilitation, the silent system, and England’s Surrey House of Correction, which employed a Hollywood Squares-like arrangement of stacked, boxed-in pews to keep adjacent prisoners from communicating. In its chapter “The Literature of Confinement,” the book covers well-known prisoners like the poet Paul Verlaine, who shot his fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud and wrote in confinement, “What have you done, o you there, / Who weep so endlessly, / Say, what have you done, o you there, / With your youth?”

THE PRESERVATION SOCIETY OF Newport County, Rhode Island, is sponsoring the first annual Newport Flower Show on July 13 and 14 at Rosecliff, one of the palatial oceanfront cottages built at the turn of the century. Patterned on the Grand Trianon at Versailles, Rosecliff was constructed for Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs in 1902. During the flower show its ballroom will be decorated to suggest some of the celebrated parties she held there, including the 1904 White Ball, when all the flowers and decorations were white, guests wore white, and Mrs. Oelrichs ordered up a fleet of white dummy ships to anchor offshore. Visitors will be able to tour the rose garden, where the American Beauty rose was developed, have refreshments on the terrace, and buy plants and garden ornaments. Proceeds from the flower show will help the society restore the gardens at its eight historic mansions. For more information, call the Preservation Society of Newport County, 401-847-1000, ext. 20.

by Philip Bumbam , Faber and Faber, 256 pages, $22.95. CODE: FAB-2

PHILIP BURNHAM PUT IN TWENTY-FIVE thousand miles researching this book, pulling off at every kind of roadside landmark for slaughtered Jesuits or Nebraskan homesteaders, laying bare the old and new pieties that too often govern the versions of events thousands of visitors take home. His chapter “The Indian Battle” looks at why some conflicts are called battles and others massacres. In neither incarnation—as the site of Custer’s martyrdom or of Native American triumph—can the Little Bighorn claim any real strategic significance in the outcome of the Indian wars, he points out.