The Blues singer Bessie Smith may have been the most successful black recording artist in the 1920s. She was “a very quiet woman, didn’t bother nobody,” Louis Armstrong remembered. “But, God, don’t mess with her.” At Concord, North Carolina, in July of 1927, when Klansmen tried to pull down the tent under which she was performing, she stormed all alone into their midst, cursing and vowing to “get the whole damn tent out here if I have to. You just pick up them sheets and run! ” They did.
In his last years, Jelly Roll Morton—pool shark, piano master, storyteller—liked to say that he had “invented” jazz. He hadn’t—no one had—but his claim was more legitimate than most: The recordings he made with his Red Hot Peppers beginning in 1926 demonstrated that New Orleans music could be written down and rehearsed and yet remain authentic jazz.
The July/August issue contained an interesting article about the part Barings played in the Louisiana Purchase (“The Business of America”). Barings was also instrumental in assisting the United States in another significant diplomatic matter that may not be as well known. In 1841 Alexander Baring, who had become the first Lord Ashburton, was picked by the Foreign Office in London to assist in the settlement of a serious quarrel between the United States and Canada regarding the countries’ northeastern boundary. The territory in dispute covered approximately twelve thousand square miles.
Lord Ashburton and Daniel Webster, the American Secretary of State, were friends. Both were also bankers, and they approached the problem as businessmen rather than as politicians. After short negotiations a settlement was reached and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty resolved the border dispute.
I especially enjoyed the feature “The Lady Brakemen” in your July/August issue. Not only are the accompanying photos outstanding and beautifully reproduced, but the story reminds me of how far the railroad industry has come in fifty years; today a great many women are making major contributions and hold important responsibilities in virtually all areas of the business. I would add, also, that we are better for it.
I was both appalled and delighted by the July/August issue of American Heritage. I am first appalled by the photo of O. J. Simpson on the front cover. In my years of reading American Heritage I have seen a historical perspective put on the issues of the day and appreciate your treatment of both current and past issues. However, I cannot believe that you went to the tabloid mass media for your O. J. Simpson cover. The discussion of the jury system was thought-provoking and balanced, but could have been missed by those who only saw the cover.
Thanks for Judge Hiller B. Zobel’s article on juries (“The Jury on Trial,” July/August); I, too, have been addressing the same subject recently, and I found the essay both timely and lively.
“Jazz,” Duke Ellington once told a newspaper reporter, “is freedom.” Until relatively recently, defending freedom was not an easy task in Argentina, where a dreary succession of demagogues and generals held sway. The caricaturist Hermenegildo Sábat—known as “Menchi” to his many friends—did it anyway. Year after year in the pages of the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarin (“Clarion”) he wordlessly lampooned the preening and the powerful—and somehow managed to get away with it. It should come as no surprise, then, that jazz—and the freedom it exemplifies—has been a consuming private passion for S‚bat since boyhood. It plays constantly in his big ground-floor studio in Buenos Aires—along with tango music, his other great musical enthusiasm —and his love for it shines through the astonishing series of paintings which he hopes will one day become a book and from which we offer a rich sampling on this and the following pages.
When Wynton Marsalis burst into the public eye in the early 1980s, it was as a virtuoso trumpet player. From the start he was an articulate talker too, but his bracing opinions were off-thecuff and intuitive; his ideas, like his playing, needed seasoning. In the years since, not only has Marsalis’s music deepened tremendously, his thinking has matured and coalesced to produce a coherent theory of jazz. Much of the controversy that surrounds him—he is accused of being an elitist, a snob, a killjoy—stems from the difficult position he occupies: that of the serious artist who is also a celebrity. Television talk shows are no forum for ideas; anyway, in America, intellectuals are “eggheads.” Marsalis is no elitist; rather, he is someone who loves jazz music because, unlike pop, jazz is an infinite challenge, a discipline you can spend your whole life mastering, humbling yourself daily but always growing. If he were an opera singer or a novelist, Marsalis wouldn’t be the butt of so much shallow criticism.
A letter dated June 15, 1995 came to me clipped to an attachment: our July/August cover, scissored from the issue. It showed a somber O. J. Simpson in three-quarter profile behind a cover line— THE JURY ON TRIAL —heralding Hiller B. Zobel’s essay on the history and significance of this institution. Smaller type explained: “Is the jury a relic so flawed it should be abolished? An experienced trial judge examines the historical evidence in the case.”
The accompanying letter began, “I am returning this cover to you—you know what you can do with it.” When the writer saw it, he had been “amazed, stunned, shocked, angered, provoked. …” He would have canceled his subscription had it not been a gift. However, “I have advised the giver not to renew the subscription on my behalf. I do not want to receive a magazine whose editorial board is so dumb as to produce this cover. Don’t you realize what a colossal insult it is? No! You are too stupid.” He concluded with a wish: “I hope you all get fired, you idiots.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not look favorably on European colonialism. Like most Americans, he believed that the self-determination clause of the 1941 Atlantic Charter should apply to all peoples, not just Europeans. In the war’s early years he so disagreed with Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, on the future of the British Empire that the two heads of state tacitly agreed to avoid discussing the topic. But Roosevelt ceased skirting the issue and became colonialism’s outspoken foe after he stopped over in Britain’s smallest African colony, Gambia, near the continent’s western tip, on his way to meet Churchill in Casablanca in January 1943. This brief visit put a human face on misery for the President. It was a first strong whiff of the “stench of empire” that helped crystallize Roosevelt’s thinking about the role of the organization he was envisioning to help guide the post-Empire world: the United Nations.