January 2011

I just finished reading Peter Andrews’s article “The Press” (October). I found it extremely interesting on the historical background of how we’ve come to the journalism that we, as readers and consumers, are forced to endure on a daily basis. But while I enjoyed the article, I take one exception: the author’s asking the readers of newspapers “to develop a bit of patience with newspaper coverage.”

For twenty years as a police officer I have been in a position to watch how our local and sometimes regional papers and electronic media can butcher a story, get it completely inaccurate, or simply lie. Once, for instance, my partner nearly lost a very serious and delicate rape investigation because an uncaring reporter and an indifferent editor decided to run a piece about the suspect.

You see, the suspect was the father of the two victims. Although the newspaper did not print the victims’ names, it printed his and revealed that the victims were his daughters. Both of them were in high school. You can imagine the problems this caused.

For want of nails, kingdoms are won and lost. We all know that. The shoe slips, the horse stumbles, the army dissolves in retreat. But who designed the nails? Who hammered the nails? Who invented the nail-making machinery? Who figured out how to market the nails in neat plastic blister packs hung from standardized wire racks in hardware stores? The house of history, that clever balloon frame of statistics and biographies in which we shelter our sense of tradition, of progress, of values gained and lost, is nailed together with anonymity. Too often we look at history instead as a half-timbered castellated structure, focusing on the carved keystones above the doors bearing the faces of Napoleon or Lincoln, Voltaire or Descartes, Michelangelo or Machiavelli. History tends to neglect the nails, the nuts and bolts of daily life. But in the last few years, the captains and kings have, if not departed, been joined in the history books by butchers and bakers and nail makers. 

Twenty years ago, when I was a sophomore at Brown University, it seemed to me that not much had changed in the world during my lifetime. Yes, I watched the Watergate hearings on TV that summer in color, in contrast with the black-and-white ghosts that had flickered on the screen and fertilized my imagination as a child. But I still needed the intercession of an operator to call my parents collect from the rotary phone in my apartment to ask for money. Perhaps the biggest change clear to me then concerned women. My class was the first to have women accepted to Brown itself, rather than to Pembroke. Dormitories were coed—though not yet bathrooms. And there were no parietals to govern our comings and goings. The sexual revolution was in full and, I would add now, naive swing. But if the sex part of what was happening then was inevitably short-lived, the big changes with respect to women in society surely are not.

As part of the magazine’s look back over the past forty years, American Heritage asked a wide range of historians, journalists, writers, and public figures the following question: “What do you think is the most important, or interesting, or overlooked way in which America has changed since 1954, and why? And what does this change say about us as a people?” We knew this was a broad question, to say the least, but we were still surprised by the answers it elicited; they turned out to be as various and provocative and illuminating as the people they came from. An anthology follows.

The Terbul Deklin of Liturcy

-Shana Alexander, author, Poles Apart: My Mother, My Father, My Sister and Me

The change from waxed paper to cling wrap says it all.

-Nicholson Baker, author, U and I, Vax, and The Fermata

As the editors discovered right at the outset of planning this issue, it is all but impossible to think about the course of the past 40 years without also thinking about Walter Cronkite. He helped invent broadcast journalism, brought it to a level of professionalism that has never been surpassed, and, for decades on “The CBS Evening News,” explained to the nation the events that have since coalesced into history. Along the way, he made history, too: his powerful reports in the wake of the Tet offensive, for instance, were pivotal in the country’s lone disengagement from the Vietnam War and may have played a role in bringing about President Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968.

It was a very good year. Certainly it was if you were 17. I was a senior in high school in 1954, a member of the class of January 1955, at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, New Jersey. They told us these were the best years of our lives, so we had better enjoy them. We all laughed at that, of course, but as I look back, they may have been right, particularly in September of 1954, when the first Thunderbird and the totally new 1955 Chevy V-8 lit up our limited horizons.

In August 1950, I began working with a group of business and professional executives to establish a non-profit organization in New York that would place college women in jobs and steer them along their career paths. We called ourselves the Alumnae Advisory Center. Discrimination against women, and against older women in particular, was perfectly legal; early civil rights legislation outlawed bias related only to race, religion, and national origin.

World War II had ended five years earlier. Women, who had been holding men’s jobs—riveting, drafting, engineering, piloting—were given pink slips, while men returned to their old jobs, which had been held for them as required by law.

Half the members of our board of directors advocated not opening our office until we had a roster of applicants; the other half insisted that we first collect a file of jobs. We opened on August 14 with neither. That morning,  The New York Times carried a short article announcing our new service. By the time I got to work, a 20-foot-long line of women stood waiting.

Happy Birthday, American Heritage! I say it with a certain avuncular pride, for, though I am not among the magazine’s first contributors, I come close. My earliest appearance in these pages was in the fifth number of the first hard-cover volume, dated August 1955. For the moment, I am simply establishing my old-timer credentials. I am the only first-year contributor now writing a regular column. Moreover, of my fellow 20 present contributing editors, only two others (Oliver Jensen and John A. Garraty) had signed pieces in the first year’s issues and two more—Joseph Thorndike, Jr., and Joan Paterson Kerr (then Mills)—were, like Jensen, on the editorial staff in December 1954.

Billie Holiday made hundreds of memorable recordings before her death 35 years ago, but she never liked any of them much: “... it’s always something that you should have done,” she told an interviewer. “Or you should have waited here, or you should have phrased—well, you know how it is.”

She was an artist, fully conscious (except when one or another of her twin addictions temporarily befogged her mind) of the effect on her audience of every precisely enunciated syllable, every languid rhythm and shrewdly slurred phrase.

by David Plowden, introduction by David McCullough, Abrams, 159 pages, $49.50 . CODE: ABS-4