introduction by William
Shawcross, Thames and Hudson, 120 pages .
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January 2011
by Peter Washington, Schocken Books, 470 pages . America was settled largely by religious misfits from the Old World, and its centuries of spiritual yearnings and upheavals are more than rich enough to fill this engrossing book by the English writer Peter Washington. The author is fully aware of just how entertaining his material is, but he gets beneath it to reveal the undercurrents in nineteenth-century America that produced each spiritual vogue, from astral light to chromopathy to transcendentalism. None of his characters is more interesting or elusive than the founder of Theosophy, Madame Helena Blavatsky.
by Roy Hoopes, Random House, 357 pages . World War II may have produced more challenging roles for Hollywood stars than an army of producers could ever have dreamed up. David Niven stoically flew back to England, Jimmy Stewart became a combat flier, and Henry Fonda eagerly joined the Navy. The Treasury Department called on celebrities to sell war bonds: Hedy Lamarr sold kisses for $25,000 apiece; the less kissable Charles Laughton set up three coffins marked “Hitler,” “Hirohito,” and “Mussolini” for people to drive nails into “at the cost of one $18.75 bond per nail.” Hollywood also created immensely successful wartime shows; the tireless USO did 428,521 live performances. Everyone was eager to contribute. Even Lucille Ball, in a fittingly absurd incident, reported to the FBI when she heard suspicious noises coming from her new tooth filling. Investigators discovered a transmitter nearby “belonging to a gardener who was, indeed, part of a Japanese spy ring.”
A gathering of recent books, videos, recordings, and other items of special interest to the readers of American Heritage , selected and recommended by the editors.
American Heritage was perfectly right in declaring that “during his years as a broadcaster, [Walter Cronkite] was the most trusted figure in American public life” (“He Was There,” December 1994). It seems worth a moment’s reflection about why this should have been so. He was regarded as more avuncular than Uncle Sam, and a good deal more respectable. There was, in the timbre of his voice, in the firmness of his composure, something that seemed deeply reassuring to anxiety-ridden American citizens. And his measured optimism seems somehow confirmed by the outline of his life, which emerges in the course of the interview as blessedly fortunate.
Nevertheless, I recall feeling an uneasiness that has lingered with me ever since Mr. Cronkite covered the Watergate hearings. When, near the end of many sessions, the whole tawdry story began to unravel, Mr. Cronkite, with imperturbable calm, assured us that “the system works” and that the truth, for all the deceptions that had been played on a hoodwinked public, would infallibly emerge.
The co-authors of “Plain Faking?” (May/June) are skeptical that Truman ever knew of any correspondence between Marshall and Elsenhower regarding the latter’s desire to divorce Mamie and marry Kay Summersby because they seem to doubt that such correspondence ever existed.
Test-driving automobiles, Henry Adams discovered in June 1904, was “shattering to one’s nerves.” Trying out a Hotchkiss for purchase “scared my hair green. Truly it is a new world that I live in,” he continued, “though its spots are old. … The pace we go is quite vertiginous. Only men under forty are fit for it.” He was sixty-six, born in Boston in 1838, when railroads were replacing canals. Shortly before his death in 1918, with airplanes performing loops above his Washington house, he found himself “in a new universe of winged bipeds.” The grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams, he grew up, as he wrote in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, not doubting that “a system of society which had lasted since Adam would outlast one Adams more.” The family tradition of statesmanship foundered, however, in the morass of late-nineteenth-century politics. In the fourth generation not one of the Adamses achieved political distinction.
The debate over the so-called earliest daguerreotype of Lincoln has moved south —anatomically speaking, that is. Having spent months comparing the face in the controversial photograph with faces in dozens of known Lincoln images—using computer overlays and state-of-the-art video “morphing” techniques to reveal similarities and differences—both advocates and detractors have now taken matters in hand: the right hand, to be precise.