January 2011

While Ken Bums considers the 1882 Dartmouth baseball scene to be the “best” baseball photograph of all time (October), I believe a far more appropriate selection would be the July 4, 1939, shot of Lou Gehrig humbly standing in Yankee Stadium. In a moment of supreme poignancy, facing his own mortality as he was being consumed by a hateful disease, Gehrig told a packed stadium that he was “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

Gehrig’s simple decency and his bravery were captured with the click of a camera as he said good-bye to the team and sport he loved so deeply. What a lesson this provides us today as we view the sorry state of baseball.

Peter Andrews states that Alexander Hamilton “inveighed against the liberality” of the First Amendment. I understand that to mean that Hamilton asserted that the then-proposed amendment would give the press too much freedom. However, Hamilton opposed the amendment because it could weaken the press. In Federalist No. 84, the very issue that Andrews quotes from, Hamilton said that the new federal government would lack the power to control the press, but adopting the First Amendment would imply that it held that power. Hamilton argued that adopting the First Amendment was “dangerous,” because the amendment could subject the press to control rather than keep it free. He also said that the concept of “liberty of the press” is so vague that it would carry little real meaning and that the real protection for the press lies in public opinion and the “general spirit of the people and of the government.”

Last year, when protests from a. surprisingly effective group of historians and environmentalists discouraged the Disney Company from building a historical theme park near a former Civil War battlefield in Virginia’s Prince William County, the news made America’s front pages. For an organization called the Civil War Trust, though, that fight was only a skirmish in the larger campaign it has waged since 1991. Its members hope to buy up thousands of battlesite acres nationwide to save them from the bulldozer. The trust, an alliance of historians and business people, has already reclaimed fiftysix acres at Harpers Ferry’s Schoolhouse Ridge, where a housing development threatened to tar over the scene of Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 siege. It has also saved land at Mills Spring, Kentucky, at Missouri’s Westport Battlefield, and at Antietam.

directed by Marlene Booth, Direct Cinema, 58 mins.

I very much enjoyed the several essays on the press in the October American Heritage . In the principal one, “The Press,” there’s a subheading that says: “The Press Is Inaccurate.” Then it cites Ben Bradlee as the fellow who coined that wonderful phrase describing the newspaper as “the first rough draft of history.” Rather it was, I do believe you’ll find, the late publisher of the Washington Post , Philip L. Graham, who said that.

It came, I understand, from a speech he made in 1963 in London before Newsweek foreign correspondents. There, he said: “So let us drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand.”

There’s a wonderful old, not-meant-to-be-mean expression in this business: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!”

“Country Music” told me what I heard! I was raised in northeastern Pennsylvania on station WGBI, pop and Polish music, until World War II. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean we would listen to V discs, 78s playing light classical over the ship’s publicaddress system. Suddenly the concert would be interrupted by a radio man’s “eee-yah!” Loud and sometimes clear, WWVA West-b’God Virginia would blare country. Half the ship felt at home, the other half enjoyed a musical visit to that home.

For many of the men aboard, the most memorable event of World War II was Roy Acuff’s performance in Norfolk, Virginia. It attracted the biggest crowd I’d ever seen outside a ball park. My favorite? Bob Wills. Like “Rose of Old San’ Tone,” good country still lives “within my heart.”

The splendid article on country music by Tony Scherman is very accurate and insightful (meaning: I agree with it). It also brought back many memories of my early youth, with the whole family hunched around the Crosley, straining to hear Uncle Dave Macon (my favorite) above the static. In the late 1930s, when Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff were both new stars on the “Opry,” my parents would argue every Saturday night about the relative merits of the two singers. My mother preferred Roy Acuff, while my father was a lifelong Bill Monroe fan. Much later, when my widowed father was in his eighties, I had a picture taken of me standing beside Bill Monroe at the Dahlonega, Georgia, Bluegrass Festival, and had the photo enlarged and framed as a Christmas gift for my father. As he unwrapped it, I could see he was both delighted and puzzled. He said he recognized only one of the men in the photo. I said, “That’s Bill Monroe!” He said, “I know that, but who is the other person?” As I said, he was a Bill Monroe fan.

Country music is an expression of the times. It comes from the heart. The generations of Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Acuff, Hank Williams and their concerns are history. The world is a different place now. That doesn’t mean one generation’s music is better than the rest—just different. If today’s country music has “little true grit,” tell me what it’s like to lose a friend to AIDS and not react to Reba’s “She Thinks His Name Was John.” Take a moment to listen to the words of “The Dance” by the “blandly commercial” Garth Brooks. Have you ever attended a Garth Brooks concert and witnessed the connection that he makes with his audience?

Our battles may differ from those of the Depression and World War II, or Vietnam, but that doesn’t make them any less powerful. Country music speaks from the heart of this nation. I play country music on the radio everyday. I speak not to the corporations but to the men and women who are moved by the music Mr. Scherman dismisses.