January 2011

Along with millions of my fellow Americans watching on television, I saw DeRonda Elliott’s (“D-day: What It Cost,” May/June) participation in the D-day commemoration. I saw the waves of emotion—pride foremost—that crossed her face as President Clinton read from her father’s letters. I saw the loving care with which, in an earlier recorded report, she held and displayed those letters. And as she searched for, and then located, the grave of her father, CpI. Frank Elliott, in the American Military Cemetery; as she and her daughter fell to their knees before the stone cross; as she said to him, “I never called you Daddy before,” I along with many thousands of others wept with them.

The poignancy of these moments was deepened by our having had the opportunity to get to know the Elliotts through their letters as published in American Heritage . Thank you for helping teach us to appreciate the human costs involved in that terrible and wonderful endeavor.

In his essay on the significance of D-day, “D-day: What It Meant” (May/June), Charles Cawthon writes that had “the British [won] at Saratoga … oppression would have had a further run.” But the effect of Saratoga was catastrophic for those now commonly referred to as Native American (itself a Eurocentric term). Unlike the colonists, the British crown, if it treated the native tribes as subject, did attempt to protect their rights. I doubt if any Cherokee aware of his heritage considers it as a blessing of liberty that a true Democrat, Andrew Jackson, had the final say on their interests rather than William IV. Further, slavery was abolished in the British colonies during William’s reign; Saratoga helped to delay emancipation in these colonies by some thirty years.

This is of course not to question the substantive thesis of the article as to D-day; there can be few instances in history where there was so demonstrably an evil that had to be stopped. But it adds little to the argument to compare it to the relatively benign rule of the House of Hanover.

Robert Capa’s photograph on the cover of the May/June issue brought back strong memories. I was on an LCI-L 94, and Mr. Capa came aboard after he had taken pictures while we were unloading troops on Omaha Beach. We were pinned down under fire at the time, and tangled with cables anchoring German mines. Some of our crew had been killed, and Mr. Capa photographed the wounded being treated. After about an hour under fire our captain’s fine seamanship allowed us to retract our anchor and then float again, and we returned to a transport with the wounded and Mr. Capa. He later printed his picture in Life magazine. Of the four ships on that section of the beach, we were the only LCI-L to get under way again. I remember Capa coming into the engine room to dry his film, so nervous he was smoking cigarettes in both hands. He boarded a transport to return to England with his film.

History is revisionism. It is the frequent—nay, the ceaseless—reviewing and revising and rethinking of the past. The notion that the study and the writing of history consist of the filling of gaps or the adding of new small bricks to the building of the cathedral of historical knowledge was a nineteenth-century illusion (“We have now histories of the Federalists in every New England State, except for Connecticut. You must do Connecticut”), allied with the fantasy that once the scientific method has been followed precisely, with all extant documents exhausted, the result will be definite and final (“the definitive account of Waterloo, approved by British as well as by French and German and Dutch historians”). There are important differences between historical and legal evidence, one of them being that the historian deals in multiple jeopardy that the law eschews; the former is retrying and retrying again. There is nothing very profound in this observation, since that is what all thinking is about. Not the future, and not the present, but our past is the only thing we know.

My brother called me from Youngstown recently with a bright idea. Why not get up a three-piece band for a meeting of his musical club next month when I planned to be in town? Verne Ricketts was available to play the piano, and Hype Hosterman might be rounded up to play the drums.

The idea left me cold. My hand holding the phone was filled with arthritis, and I hadn’t touched a sax for about a half-century. And Verne Ricketts—he must be 90. He played Idora Park when I was only eight. I was about to ask my brother why he didn’t play the sax himself. He could always cut the stuff better than I could, and his imitation of Ted Lewis was absolutely the best I ever saw. Then I remembered. He’d lost three fingers back in 1942.

So, I told him maybe and let it go at that.

But his call tapped something in my brain, and memories gushed out, memories of those hundreds of nights during the Great Depression when I played sax for people who were trying to wring a little fun out of a ten-cent beer, a nickel bag of chips, and a few dances.

The trouble began at midmorning on Wednesday, April 21, 1948, when a neighboring farm’s trash fire got out of control. Flames skittered across the grassy farmyard and began chewing swiftly through a marsh toward the “plantation” of white and red pines that the professor and his family had been nurturing diligently on their 120-acre patch of worn-out Wisconsin farmland since 1935. He, his wife, Estella, and their daughter “Estella Jr.” had driven up from Madison four days earlier, settling in at the renovated chicken coop they called “the shack” and preparing for the annual spring planting of even more trees in the family’s ongoing effort to recreate the land as it had been before farmers and loggers had stripped it clean of its original forests.

I remember hearing that, back when American Heritage began, there was a certain amount of fretting on the part of the editorial staff. Things were going well at the moment—wonderfully, in fact—but what would happen in five, ten, or fifteen years when all the stories had been told? It hasn’t happened yet, and that’s not only because what might at the outset have sounded like a constricting franchise—American history—is actually a limitless one. There are thousands, millions, of different stories, but it’s broader even than that because as John Lukacs reminds us in this issue, all the stories always change.

The nineteenth century’s great quantifying quest for order was so powerful and effective that even today it is easy to think of the discipline of history as disciplined enough to allow for a final, definitive version of some sequence of events.

“I’m dad-gum disgusted at trying to police every half-square and every half-house,” Senator Huey Long told a radio audience in Louisiana in May 1935. “You can’t close gambling nowhere where the people want to gamble.”

Dozens of casinos in St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes reopened the next day, after a nearly five-month hiatus.

In California, Santa Anita Race Track was in the midst of its second season in the summer of 1935. As sleek as a luxury ocean liner, it brought horseracing to the West Coast, whereupon a network of bookmakers brought it to the neighborhoods. “1 had a wedding at four o’clock yesterday,” wrote a minister from Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. “It was with no little reluctance that the bride’s parents turned off the radio which bore the news of their horses.”

I am told that many people have difficulty in deciding the most exciting moment in their lives. Not I. For me, it was August 25, 1944—the day of the liberation of Paris half a century ago. I was there as a war correspondent courtesy of the American 4th Infantry Division.

To appreciate the mystique of Paris, I think you had to have been born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Thomas Appleton said that “when they’re dead, good Americans go to Paris,” and in those distant days the only way most of us could get there alive was to dream.

“Ordered from Joe 6 winter yellow legs (greater). New shape and bigger. Paid him $2.” So reads the diary of one Herbert F. Hatch for Friday, July 15, 1898. “Joe” was his friend, mentor, and hunting companion Joe Lincoln, whose greater yellowlegs decoy is pictured on the opposite page.

Joseph Whiting Lincoln (1859–1938) lived in the Accord section of Hingham, Massachusetts on Boston’s South Shore. The son of a cooper, Lincoln was a shoe-factory worker until machinery phased out his job. He then took up a variety of part-time occupations, including clock repair, upholstery, horticulture, and, beginning in the 1870s, bird-carving. Working at a chopping post in a corner of the tiny shop that had been his father’s cooperage, Joe Lincoln produced some of the finest decoys ever made.