January 2011

by William Maxwell, Alfred A. Knopf, 415 pages .

Private Snafu, the reluctant protagonist of the Army’s World War II instructional cartoons mentioned in our “Letter From the Editor,” can be seen enduring “A Lecture on Camouflage” and battling “Malaria Mike” in Private S.N.A.F.U. (Rhino Home Video, 60 minutes).

The men who flew the Enola Gay on its fateful mission over Japan owed much of their knowledge of the B-29 to an exhaustive U.S. Army Air Forces manual now authentically reproduced for the anniversary of the war’s end. How to Fly the B-29 Superfortress: The Official Manual for the Plane That Bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Greenhill/Stackpole Books, 160 pages) is exactly what its blunt title suggests. Thumbing through its big manila pages, you learn about “Planning the Mission,” “Operation of the Bomb Bay Doors,” “Formation Flying,” “Standard Bombing Procedure,” “Combat Gunnery,” “Escape from the Plane,” and “First Aid in Flight.” A series of blurry photos is meant to help bombardiers distinguish between hostile and friendly vessels on the high seas.

by Dennis Covington, Addison-Wesley, 240 pages .

Dennis Covington, a novelist and New York Times stringer, got his introduction to the snake-handling faith in 1991, when he covered the trial of a preacher in Scottsboro, Tennessee, who had forced his wife at gunpoint to stick her hand into a rattlesnake’s box. She survived the snakebites and charged her husband with attempted murder, dividing the congregation of the Church of Jesus with Signs Following. Covington discovered a fascinating world of snake-handling services in converted gas stations and in fields, marathon services with blaring guitars, people speaking in tongues, and preachers proving their righteousness by drinking strychnine and handling vipers.

As an avid reader of American Heritage I particularly enjoyed the fortieth anniversary issue. I was also pleased to see that one of my former law partners, the late John Flynn, the “ Miranda lawyer,” was profiled as one of the ten “agents of change” who have made today’s world vastly different from forty years ago.

Knowing your penchant for historical accuracy, I wish to point out an inaccuracy in your profile. It states that Flynn became a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals. In fact, Flynn remained in private practice and continued trying cases until his untimely death. Indeed, for those of us who knew John well, the thought of him willingly assuming the life and lifestyle of an appellate judge is implausible to say the least.

This eight-inch-tall man, suffering from a goiter and rickets, is the only carved pipe to bear a human form among hundreds that have been found in prehistoric burial sites in the Ohio River Valley. It was discoverd nearly a hundred years ago on an estate called Adena, whose name archeologists subsequently assigned to the little-known people whose passage on earth probably ended there two thousand years ago. The remarkable structures and artifacts they and their successors the Hopewell Indians left behind are the subject of an article within.

The most significant change in the last forty years is the decline of the American civic religion, or ideology. Often violated and surrounded by hypocrisy, it nonetheless prevailed and benefited the country for much of this century. It was based on two factors: widely accepted moral restraint and widely practiced social and political accommodation.

The first has been badly eroded. Of the many, disparate symptoms, no less indicative because they are so familiar, I would cite the seemingly irresistible rise of crime, the dramatic increase of out-of-wedlock births (by no means only in the “underclass”), and—on a different level—the suffocating flood of money in political life. Despite much apocalyptic scolding in some quarters, society meets these situations with a shrug of resignation. (What could be a more vivid instance of giving up than
the distribution of condoms to school-children?)

In 1954 there were few women in the work force. Most who had joined it during World War II returned to work in the home in the fifties. There were few women lawyers, doctors, or, of course, politicians.

Anywhere we look today—whether in the sciences, politics, education, business, or the arts—we see enormous change in the status and participation of women. By the year 2005, three out of five new entrants to the work force will be women. Many law schools report more female than male students and, for the first time ever, this fall, women constituted a majority of medical students entering Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Harvard.

A gateway of opportunity is springing open, largely due to the trailblazing work of women who came before us. Their outstanding efforts in the face of criticism and doubt started to change attitudes, and they remain as role models and inspiration to women today.

Mount Carmel Cemetery lies straight west of the Loop in the suburb of Hillside. It’s an appropriate place to wind up a tour of Prohibition-era crime sites. LeVell and I arrive just before closing. A hundred yards to the right of the Roosevelt Road gate is the Capone monument, as modest as his Prairie Avenue home, the name deliberately hidden by shrubbery. “My Jesus Mercy,” Al’s stone pleads.

“There is no life except in death” is the inscription on the grave of Frank Nitti, buried here under his real name, Nitto. Earl (“Hymie”) Weiss’s remains are encased in an elaborate mausoleum, as are those of the Genna brothers. A walk around the neatly maintained graveyard is sobering. It provides another taste of the reality of it all, a sense of a time when these dead men were larger than life.

All alone in his plot, under a small obelisk, is Dion O’Banion. Appropriately, the day we visit, this florist’s grave is decorated with a modest bouquet of carnations.

The John Dillinger Historical Museum, a few hours’ drive from Chicago in sleepy Nashville, Indiana, reflects something of its subject’s rural origins and modest tastes. Proprietor Joe Pinkston, a former Pinkerton investigator and the co-author of Dillinger: A Short and Violent Life , has amassed a thorough and wide-ranging assortment of memorabilia. He’s turned his collection into an intriguing museum, complete with wax figures of the Dillinger gang members and a genuine 1933 Hudson Terraplane—“John’s favorite car,” he notes.

We can read original letters that Dillinger wrote to family members from prison. They display a boyish sentimentality. One, to his wife, Beryl, is signed, “Love from hubby—XXXOOO.” The love didn’t last; she divorced him before he was paroled.

Particularly fascinating are the notes the gang prepared in order to direct their getaways from bank robberies. The directions carefully break the route down to tenths of a mile, cite crossroads and landmarks along the way, and warn about stretches of bad road.