January 2011

SAILORS HAVE BEEN TAKING DOGS TO SEA SINCE A PAIR OF canines shipped out with Noah. Nevertheless, the picture of the floppy-eared poodle, looking as jaunty and confident as the young submariners who surrounded her, surprised me. What was the dog’s name? I wondered. Why was it on a submarine? A scrawl on the back of the photo revealed only that this was the crew of the USS Whale after its return from its eighth war patrol in the Pacific.

The Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, Connecticut, where I’m the director, has thousands of books, documents, and photographs about U.S. submarine operations but no file, I realized, about mascots. Were there dogs on board other submarines? If so, could we find enough information about them to perhaps mount an exhibit for the museum? For the next six months the curator, the archivist, and I kept a watch for pictures and stories of what we came to call sea dogs. Our finds were infrequent; once in a while we’d turn up a picture in a folder or a brief reference in a yellowed news clipping.

Georg Daniel Flohr, a butcher’s son, enlisted at 19 in the Regiment Royal-Deux-Ponts, a German outfit in the service of France, and came to America in 1780 with the Comte de Rochambeau’s army to help the Continentals in their struggle against Great Britain. Readers of this magazine may recall the beautifully illustrated diary that Flohr kept of his service, which for a century lay unnoticed in Strasbourg’s main library. For the December 1992 issue, I wrote an article, “Private Flohr’s America,” that reproduced some of those superb sketches and his account—the only one known by an enlisted man in Rochambeau’s forces—of his march south from Newport to Yorktown and the signal feat of arms there that cost Britain its American colonies.

The victory won, Private Flohr returned home; discharged by the Royal-Deux-Ponts in 1784, he settled in Strasbourg. “Nothing is known of his later life,” I wrote. That was true at the time, but I am happy to say that thanks to an unusual chain of coincidences, it no longer is.

Turn back to page 86 and you will be there as the local Dartmouth College nine plays Harvard on the green at Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1882.

Looking like an early plan for our national capital, this remarkable photograph is baseball for me —an intersection of community, time, location, and hope. I imagine the photographer sticking his bulky machine out the window of a college building to record this moment in much the same way a daydreaming student might be wafted out and down to the play going on a million miles from his classroom.

“It’s our game . . . America’s game,” Walt Whitman wrote. “It has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our Constitution’s laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”

I couldn’t agree more. The story of baseball is the story of our country. No other narrative, it seems to me, more accurately takes the measure of the complicated Republic that the Civil War defined than does this deceptively simple game.

Beyond question, the subject in the 1843 daguerreotype is not Abraham Lincoln, and the photos accompanying your article provide irrefutable proof of this. Please refer to the computer-generated transition from the 1843 daguerreotype to the well-known 1846 daguerreotype of Lincoln, shown on page 40 of your article, and compare the ear of the subject of the 1843 daguerreotype to that of Lincoln in the 1846 daguerreotype, noting that:

1. Lincoln’s ear protrudes more than that of the unidentified subject.

2. The external contours of the ears are different.

3. The configuration of the “antihelix” (the area of the external ear where the cartilage bends backward) is totally different.

While the ears do change shape somewhat with age, the basic configurations do not. There would certainly not be perceptible change in these specific anatomical characteristics during the short span of time between age thirty-four and age thirtyseven.

I was fascinated to read the account of the 1843 Lincoln daguerreotype in the February/March issue (“Is This the First Photograph of Abraham Lincoln?”). I’m afraid I don’t see the resemblance, even to the 1846 Lincoln daguerreotype taken only a few years later—although the asymmetrical droop of the eyelids, also seen in other photographs, is intriguing.

The convolutions of the human outer ear show considerable anatomical variation, and were used for personal identification before the adoption of fingerprinting. The left ear visible in 1843 does resemble the 1846 ear. The sculptors Leonard Wells Volk and Clark Mills made plaster life masks of Lincoln, and Mills made a bronze casting of his mask. These casts could also provide detailed models of the ear for comparison.

Woo-wee! I do believe Doctor Ferris and Professor Morris (“The Water in Which You Swim,” July/August) are running the best scam in the Lower Mississippi since the Duke and the Dauphin worked those parts. But at least they’re homeboys, and they give new luster to the term professional Southerner . And they give new hope to misplaced compatriots: If you don’t get treated right in New York City or London, England, you can always come home and start up a center for the study of Southern culture and rake in Yankee dollars, yen, francs, and deutschemarks from strangers shopping for the kind of wisdom the Doctor’s 101-year-old grandmomma used to give away free. Well, my grandmomma only lived to be 99, but she was more original and always used to tell me that blood was thinner than turpentine. Which means that a respectable magazine like American Heritage ought to post a warning when it opens its pages to hucksters—even if they’re family.

I’VE NEVER LIKED BASEBALL MUCH, IN part because my father has always loved it so. He has been a fan all his life, rooting first for the Cleveland Indians, who were the closest major leaguers to the small Ohio town in which he was raised, and then for the Chicago White Sox, heroes to at least half the city in which he and my mother raised my brother and sister and me. I enjoyed playing catch with him in the cindery back yard of our South Side home, can still remember the thrilling shudder that climbed my arms whenever I managed to get the bat on his erratic curve, enjoyed the occasional trips with him to Comiskey Park to see his team play. But it was clear early on that I had years of serious study ahead of me before I could come close to matching his apparently effortless omniscience.

It’s a bad sign when a company decides that, to sell its products, it needs to bundle them together with miscellaneous, unrelated goods. It suggests that relations have grown strained between product and customer, that either the product is obsolete or the competition is fierce. But, in the short run, a bribe can work wonders. I know many holders of American Express cards, for example, who agree to use them, instead of their much cheaper Visa cards, only because American Express tosses frequent-flier miles into the bargain. It should be said, however, that the bribe almost always reveals the vague contempt that the company feels for the intelligence of its customers. After all, the reason the company offers the added goodie is that it’s cheaper than lowering its prices. And every so often, the bribe is deeply, if implicitly, insulting. For example, the purveyors of neon-colored, candy-coated cereals clearly believe that the lure of a cheap trinket inside the box is all that is required to entice a child to poison her- or himself.

I first met the writer whose essay on the American press dominates this issue one afternoon more than twenty years ago. I’d recently joined the staff of American Heritage, and he had just been hired to start a sister publication called Americana. “I’m Peter Andrews,” said a husky man about fifteen years my senior, stepping into my little tin office while he lit a cigar of preternatural vileness. “Good,” he grunted, leaned against the doorjamb, drew vigorously on the cigar a few times, then removed it from his mouth and regarded it fondly as it fed a mephitic blue haze into the dimming room. “You know—Richard, right?—a lot of people object to my cigars. They say they’re cheap, disgusting, awful, make them sick.” He scowled, shrugged, brightened. “But I say, ----’em. Let’s go get a drink.” Over it he told me he had been a newspaperman. I was not amazed.

In 1928, the New York Daily News recruited Tom Howard, a Chicago Tribune photographer who was unknown to New York law-enforcement authorities. His assignment: Penetrate the death chamber at Sing Sing prison—off limits to cameramen—and record the electrocution of Ruth Snyder, a woman sentenced to the chair for the murder of her husband. The resulting picture, made with a pre-focused miniature camera strapped to Howard’s ankle, was splashed across page one on Friday, January 13, under the classically economical headline DEAD!

The gruesome image of Snyder’s death throes is unique in the history of press photography, yet in many ways the picture and the planning that went into it typify a form—the tabloid-style photograph—characterized variously by immediacy, irreverence, prurience, and humor.