January 2011

Many people think that salvaging artifacts from the sunken Titanic amounts to something ghoulish, like grave robbing. “The Wreck of the Titanic ,” now on view at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, is the first exhibit of just such items: clothes, machinery, dishes, and papers, stolen back from the ocean after more than eighty years. According to the deep-sea explorers, corpses didn’t last. Only the tumble of things that amused or comforted them while they were alive did. Of course it is eerie to see something ephemeral like a row of cigarettes emerge unscathed when so many perfectly good people did not, and so this firsthand exhibit, a fitting memorial to the eeriest of all ships, actually only deepens the mysteries surrounding the Titanic . (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England SE10 9NF, 011-44-81-858-4422.)

by James Kitfteld, Simon & Schuster, 476 pages .

James Kitfield’s Prodigal Soldiers begins with the story of Barry McCaffrey, who graduated from Andover and went to West Point in 1959, when the Regular Army was at the height of its postwar prestige. By 1966 McCaffrey was a first lieutenant in the 82d Airborne in Vietnam. He and his troops were sent to relieve a Marine firebase and were quickly surrounded, sniped at, and shelled by North Vietnamese Army troops while NVA gunners shot down medevac helicopters. By morning all the American troops and a third of the South Vietnamese battalions with them were dead or wounded, and the living were facing near-certain massacre. Magically a lone American gunship appeared. Barry McCaffrey mostly recovered from his wounds, incurred through faithful service in pursuit of a grossly misconceived strategy, within a month; it would take the U.S. Army more like twenty-five years.

(revised edition) by Hugh Gallagher, Vandamere Press, 242 pages .

When this pioneering book was first published a decade ago, it ended forty years of silence about the true extent of Franklin Roosevelt’s paralysis, the genuine gallantry of his struggle to overcome its effects, and the extraordinary collaboration between President and press—unthinkable in our adversarial time—that kept the brutal truth of FDR’s condition from the American electorate. The author, himself a polio paraplegic, managed to convey as no biographer ever had before—and without a mawkish moment—what it must have been like for this vigorous, athletic young man to find himself imprisoned in a wheelchair and then to fight his way to the pinnacle of American political power in spite of it. The vivid, moving story set forth in this newly revised edition (which includes several newly discovered photographs) should provide inspiration for anyone struggling against any sort of handicap.

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.

In your anniversary issue there is one area of progress that you don’t mention, and I doubt if anyone else will either. That is the general demise of dandruff. “Infectious dandruff” or, medically, “seborrheic dermatitis” was so rampant at the time you started your magazine that people wearing blue suits looked as if they had a snowstorm on their shoulders. Since the germ causing the dandruff ( Pityrosporon ovale ) is lipophilic (or in laymen’s language, eats fat), the national craze at that time for using lanolin contributed to it. As a dermatologist, whatever other disease I saw, there was also additional seborrheic dermatitis. Telling patients, particularly those with beehive hairdos, that they should wash their heads more frequently was not received with enthusiasm. Almost no one washed his or her head more than once a week, and women with beehive hairdos usually washed only once a month, and there were many patients who never washed their heads at all, only brushed and combed their hair. They felt that washing their hair frequently made it fall out!

No one touched on what could be the most significant change of all —a change that may very well determine what kind of civil liberties we pass on to our children in the twenty-first century. I am referring to our income tax system. How a nation taxes—who is taxed, what is taxed, and how taxes are assessed, collected, and spent-will tell you more about that nation than anything else.

In 1954 our income tax was on an honor system. In my first audit as a tax lawyer, a veteran IRS agent started with these words, which have stayed in my mind ever since: “Ours is an honor system,” he said, “which is the only way it will work in a free society.” I don’t know if that was his personal approach or if it was recommended IRS policy. But at that time the only information reporting on taxpayers was the W-2, which enabled wage earners to claim a refund at the end of the year.

How has America changed since 1954? Surely, at some point, the decline of organized labor and the rise of the citizens’ environmental movement should both be mentioned. In 1955, when the AFL and the CIO merged into one force, labor was at the height of its power and even Republican conservatives listened carefully to its voice. America was an industrial nation, and unions were well-established in the steel mills, coal mines, and factories where many Americans found employment. Unions could deliver the votes that politicians needed. Labor and management, together, pointed the way to something called “progress.”

For more information on Ohio’s mounds, call 1-800-BUCKEYE and ask to speak to a counselor who can provide hours of operation, phone numbers, and locations. The Ohio Historical Society in Columbus has a splendid exhibit on local prehistory, and their education department (614-297-2600) will also answer questions. A popular show at the planetarium of Ohio’s Youngstown State University demonstrates how earthworks were aligned to the sun (216-742-3616). In West Virginia, Grave Creek Mound State Park is a fifteen-minute drive south of Wheeling; its Delf Norona Museum and Cultural Centre houses a fine collection of artifacts that help shed light on the Adena people and the mounds they built (304-843-1410).

How could all of these erudite luminaries omit the demise of the “church key,” without which no beer bust in my college days could have come to fruition? But more important still—far more important—is the demise of sidewalks, front porches, and swings. Sidewalks made neighbors; neighbors made neighborhoods; neighborhoods made communities in which everyone knew each other for blocks around with no locked doors.

Robert Maslowski and I made our way carefully across the tobacco field, trying not to disturb the neat rows of freshly plowed furrows. On the other side of the flat valley, a tractor moved slowly across the horizon “settin’ tobacco,” as they call planting seedlings in this part of West Virginia. Our destination was also far away: an oasis of greenery in the distance that was a prehistoric Indian mound.