January 2011

I was most happy to see N. C. Wyeth’s 1930 painting “In a Dream I Meet General Washington” as the frontispiece of your November issue.

In the spring of 1976 my wife and I spent a Sunday afternoon at the home of Nathaniel Wyeth, brother of Andrew and son of N.C. The picture then hung on Nathaniel’s dining-room wall, and I said that if I could have my choice of any Wyeth painting, that would be the one.

As you say, the picture had its genesis in a recurring dream of N.C.’s, but Nathaniel pointed out to us what remains to me its most interesting feature: in the lower left-hand corner is a five-year-old boy with a sketch-pad—the young Andrew Wyeth.

Your splendid feature “The American Century of Bessie and Sadie Delany” in the October issue is oral history at its finest. The fascinating recollections of these devoted centenarian sisters, whose lives connect and represent two vastly different centuries, inspire us with the magnitude of their accomplishments as educated, successful professionals in a virulently racist and anti-female society.

These formidable individualists have blazed a brilliant trail for women after them to follow—women like Rosa Parks and Barbara Jordan, Sandra Day O’Connor and Hillary Rodham Clinton—and every woman today who wants to live a rewarding and productive life with dignity and freedom from oppression.

The Delany sisters are glowing proof that the human spirit will rise above the evils of intolerance and injustice, and that the loving hand of compassion and grace will find a refuge in every heart it touches.

Like a good many pieces of social policy legislation, the Johnson-Reed Act began to be outdated from the moment it took effect. One of its objectives—cutting down on immigration overall—was brutally affected by the Great Crash. In the deepest year of the Depression, 1933, only 34,000 immigrants arrived to take their chances in a shuttered and darkened economy.

The totals did not rise dramatically in the next seven years, but they were important weather vanes of change. Fascist and Communist dictators, and World War II, gave new meaning to the word refugee and a new scale to misery. Millions of victims of history would soon be knocking at our closed gates.

After 1865 the United States thundered toward industrial leadership with the speed and power of one of the great locomotives that were the handsomest embodiment of the age of steam. That age peaked somewhere in the 1890s. By 1929 the age of electricity and petroleum was in flower. And the United States was the world’s leading producer of steel, oil, coal, automobiles and trucks, electrical equipment, and an infinite variety of consumer goods from old-fashioned overalls to newfangled radios. The majority of Americans lived in supercities, their daily existence made possible by elaborate networks of power and gas lines, telephone wires, highways, bridges, tunnels, and rails.

And the foreign-born were at the center of the whirlwind. Expansion coincided with, depended on, incorporated the greatest wave of migration yet. In the first fourteen years after the Civil War ended yearly immigration ranged from 318,568 in 1866 to 459,803 in 1873, slumping during the hard times of 1873–77, and rebounding to 457,257 in 1880.

Jefferson’s optimistic vision of an always enlightened and open-minded America has survived as a hotly contested influence on the land. But his expectation that the nation would remain permanently agrarian was totally wrong. Half a century after he left the White House, steam power had transformed the country. Inventors and investors proved the truest American radicals. Steamboats and rail lines crisscrossed a Union that spread to the Pacific and boasted more than thirty states. Mills, mines, factories, distilleries, packinghouses, and shipyards yearly churned out millions of dollars’ worth of manufactured goods.

The Delanys Budding Genius After the War Poor Incentive

“We are a nation of immigrants.” It’s a politician’s generality at an ethnic picnic, a textbook bromide swallowed and soon forgotten. It is also, as it happens, a profound truth, defining us and explaining a good part of what is extraordinary in the short history of the United States of America. There is no American ancient soil, no founding race, but there is a common ancestral experience of moving from “there” to “here.” Among the founders of this nation who believed that they were agents of destiny was an English preacher who said in 1669, “God hath sifted a nation that he might send choice grain into this wilderness.” The grain has arrived steadily and from many nations. “Americans are not a narrow tribe,” wrote Herman Melville; “our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one.”

The uproar over Zoë Baird has subsided by now, and readers with short memories may profit by a reminder that she was forced to withdraw as President Clinton’s first nominee tor Attorney General because she and her husband had hired two “illegal aliens” for babysitting and housekeeping chores. The episode put immigration into focus as a “live” topic for op-ed and talk-show manifestoes before it faded, only to return to the headlines when Clinton embraced the Bush administration’s policy (which he had denounced during the campaign) of turning back boatloads of Haitian refugees before they reached the Florida shore. But in June of 1993, the front pages carried the tragic story of a freighter, ironically named the Golden Venture, that ran aground just outside New York City. Its hold contained a crowd of Chinese workers being unlawfully smuggled into the United States, a crude practice supposedly long obsolete. Ten of them drowned trying to swim ashore. Later in the summer several hundred more “illegal” Chinese, California-bound, were intercepted and imprisoned aboard their ships until the U.S.

Sometimes, when someone asks me why I like working for this magazine, I say it’s the perfect job for a dilettante. I’m a dilettante—a dabbler in history—and I’m glad.

History has the great advantage for a magazine editor of being everything that ever happened. That’s quite a subject matter. You get to choose from all the best stories of all time. And of course, history is also more than just everything that ever happened. It’s how we understand everything that ever happened. After all, history is what you’re after when you go to a therapist to uncover your early years, or you want to find out about your family and start digging up your roots. Or you read someone’s résumé, or look up a car’s repair record in Consumer Reports , or try to figure out whom to vote for. History is an enormous part of how we make sense of the world.

The greatest nostalgia of all is that which we feel for what we have never known,” an elderly English journalist told me when I wondered aloud why I, a 1960s rock ’n’ roll child, had become obsessed with 1930s jazz. I first discovered old Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith records as a student in Paris in the early 1970s, and I listened to each song over and over before going on to the next. I camped out with sandwiches in art cinemas there, sitting through repeated showings of Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley musicals, scribbling down lyrics and memorizing tunes. In 1972, I abandoned my work as a writer-translator and moved to London, where I dressed in vintage clothing from the Portobello Road market and eked out a living in jazz pubs, singing Billie Holiday numbers with British swing bands. When I sang that music, I—till then a rather gloomy and disenfranchised soul—felt lucky just to be alive and grateful to have been born American. It seemed to me a miracle that my ears had carried me beyond the initial shock of the old and into the glorious and sonorous world of pre-war jazz, so rich with emotion, variety, and colorful personalities.