January 2011

Today, there are few areas of human activity where women are still absent. The nation’s most populous state has sent two to the United States Senate, where they sit with six others. The Supreme Court has two female justices. All four branches of the armed services now have female combat pilots. And a woman not only managed to climb to the top of the greasy pole of British politics in recent decades, she utterly dominated it for 11 years.

But the next time there is a busy day on Wall Street, take a close look at the inevitable television pictures of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Except for the electronics, it might still be the 1920s, for the floor remains a masculine preserve.

And while women are increasingly present behind the scenes on Wall Street these days, the Street was probably the last major area of the American economy to have women move into positions of real power. It was only in 1967, after all, that a woman first held a seat on the Exchange.

When Sunrise at Campobello, Dore Schary’s play about the crippling of Franklin D. Roosevelt, opened on Broadway, Eleanor Roosevelt and two close friends were in the audience as his guests. It is a heroic double portrait in which Mrs. Roosevelt is unfailingly patient and FDR is barely permitted an unhappy thought, let alone a discouraging word. After the curtain fell, the president’s widow went backstage, where, gracious as always, she thanked the playwright and praised the whole cast, especially Ralph Bellamy, whose bravura impersonation of her husband had genuinely impressed her. But, as she and her friends rode home afterward in their taxi, she admitted that the play itself had had about as much to do with her and her family “as the man in the moon.”

Philip Jenkins states that Congress “passed the first federal gun-control law, banning the private possession of automatic weapons and machine guns.” That is wrong.

The National Firearms Act of 1934 provided for the taxation and registration of certain weapons, including fully automatic firearms. It did not ban their mere possession or their future purchase. The federal government engineered this scheme under the rationale of the government’s power to levy taxes, thus sidestepping the Second Amendment issue involved. Civilians can and do still own fully automatic firearms as long as they’re properly registered and the transfer tax paid.

Indeed, the general tone of the entire article seems quite statist in nature. I keep having the feeling that Mr. Jenkins considers federal violation of the individual right to keep and bear arms to be no big deal; therefore, why quibble over mere facts?

Bravo! It is about time someone pointed out the obvious in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, and Philip Jenkins does so: The threat to civil liberties, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States has always—from the Know-Nothings through the Ku Klux Klan through the White Citizens’ Councils through Father Coughlin through the militias of today—come from the right much more than the left.

And, as Bernard A. Weisberger points out in his column in the same issue (“In the News”), that included J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. That said, the only solution may be the one Mr. Jenkins advocates: careful prosecutions of individual perpetrators.

In Philip Jenkins’s screed “Home-Grown Terror” (September), the citizens’ militia movement is labeled as an anti-Semitic, paranoid, intolerant American societal faction preaching against and determined to visit violence upon the (good) government, its (good) policies, and (good) laws. Using as evidence one quote from a 1930s newspaper report and some photos of a half-dozen militia members in the woods of Michigan allegedly motivated by a bizarre seventeen-year-old fantasy novel called The Turner Diaries and conservative “hate” talk radio, it concludes that those Bible-thumpin’, gun-totin’ “patriotic Christian Americans” apparently have declared a jihad against (good) government! Altogether a remarkable chain of assertions linking the citizens’ militia movement to the terrorist act of the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, which has been determined by law-enforcement agents to be the action of two, possibly three, irrational people whose only connection has been service in the United States Army.

The piece on New York’s artistic triumph warms my heart. It’s great to see a magazine with as wide and diverse an audience as yours take on the subject of American art with such seriousness and style. I think David Lehman is a splendid writer, and he quite ably stated the case for what many of us believe in.

In his article on the New York art scene (“The Artistic Triumph of New York,” September), David Lehman claims—with no apparent humor or irony—that American art before the Abstract Expressionists was nothing but Grant Wood and Socialist Realism. Besides trashing the underrated Wood, he leaves out (and this is a very truncated list) Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Dorothea Tanning, Lyonel Feininger, Agnes Pelton, Charles Demuth, Peter Blume, Loïs Mailou Jones, and a lot of great painters who worked in, yes, “realist” styles.

Lehman detects paranoia in Tom Wolfe’s justly celebrated The Painted Word , but his own essay belies that charge. Pollock, de Kooning, and their ilk still enjoy better critical reviews.

Alexander Simplot’s 1861 drawing of the “Ferry New Era being transformed into a gunboat at St. Louis,” which appears in “The Forgotten Triumph of the Paw Paw ” (October), does not illustrate the “birth of a tinclad.”

I enjoyed the memorable and valuable article “Hollywood History.” Now I’ll have to get that book of essays to complete the experience; you know how we showbiz people love to read about ourselves. Of particular note for us was that our grand old studio, RKO, was the producer of nearly a third of the films discussed.

The 1939 World’s Fair in New York gave rise to all sorts of durable images that are stamped on the American psyche; literally millions of posters, paperweights, and various trinkets still pay tribute to the World of Tomorrow. Here we have an inadvertent symbol but one that is equally captivating: what appears to be a vision of present and future joined is in fact a double exposure, taken, Elizabeth Sterrett tells us, by her cousin with a Brownie box camera. “The older camera styles easily made the ‘mistake’ of double exposures,” Ms. Sterrett writes, “which were usually thrown away. I’m glad this one escaped the usual fate—it’s a nice combination of our cousin with her dog and an exceptional evening view of the fair in 1940.” Nestling up to the looming young woman of tomorrow are the best-known emblems of the fair, the Trylon and Perisphere. At the right, the domed U.S. Steel Building wears its skeleton on the outside, prefiguring an architectural trend by some thirty years.