I enjoyed John Steele Gordon’s piece “Oklahoma!” in your February/March issue but was astounded that his list of the ten greatest musicals excluded South Pacific and My Fair Lady . That’s about the same as leaving Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio off a list of all-time Yankee greats. Strange indeed. To do so is not diosyncratic; it’s irrational.
Nathan Ward’s “Gym Crow Must Go” of “The Time Machine” in the April issue is a vivid account of the crisis that engulfed Columbia University and the Parks Department twenty-five years ago, yet the story has a coda too, a happy ending of sorts. The excavation site for the gym languished for more than two decades, but in 1990-91 the scars to the land were finally healed. Through a city-funded capital renovation the hillside was re-landscaped, and the gaping hole left over from the debacle of 1968 was converted to a lily pond. Nature, with a push from humanity, has a way of reclaiming itself.
Being married to a woman whose maiden name was the same as that of one of Columbus’s captains, I found Henry Wiencek’s article especially interesting. However, he failed to mention one important event that occurred at St. Louis during the American Revolution.
St. Louis was founded in 1764, under Spanish rule, to be a trading center; and, as such, it was highly successful. The British were well aware of this and of the town’s control of the Missouri River, and their decision to capture St. Louis during the war was based on hopes of long-term strategic gains.
Fernando de Leyba, the Spanish lieutenant governor, successfully defended the town against the British attack on May 26, 1780, thus denying them the Missouri River basin.
Had the British gained control of the Missouri, there is no reason to believe they would have relinquished it at the table in Paris in 1783. There would have been no Louisiana Purchase and none of its consequences. In British hands the Gateway to the West would have remained forever closed to Americans.
As always, at least one American Heritage article appears to be chosen precisely to satisfy my interests. Henry Wiencek’s “The Spain Among Us” (April) fits that description. However (don’t letters to the editor always have a “however”?), how could he have ignored the influence of Spain on the money of the United States, most obviously, the expressions each of us use almost daily, “two bits” and “four bits,” referring to the quarter and half-dollar. The terms derive from divisions of Spanish 8 reales , the famous piece of eight, which many consider the most successful of all trade coins. The coin also was called the Spanish milled dollar.
Vance Bourjaily mentions his five-times-great-grandfather, Col. Jacob Ford, Jr., iron founder and gunpowder miller, but fails to tell us that the colonel’s mansion in Morristown, New Jersey, is a major national landmark: headquarters of the Continental Army. In 1779-80 General Washington, his wife, and seventeen of his headquarters family crowded into the house, squeezing the widow Ford and her four children into a few ground-floor rooms. The mansion and adjoining historical museum are open to the public and well worth a visit.
My boyhood home having been the Monongahela River area of Pennsylvania, I was most interested in Vance Bourjaily’s fascinating account in the April issue of his great-great-great-grandmother’s migration west (“Wisky for the Men”)—particularly her journey through the Pittsburgh area and the Ohio River Valley.
Mr. Bourjaily doubts his ancestor’s diary entry that describes Allegheny River fish that were “alligators [with] heads like a catfish and short legs,” theorizing that they were most likely flathead catfish and that she had fallen for a riverman’s tall tale. I assure the author and your readers that there is such a creature in the Ohio and its tributaries—a large salamander we call a water dog, but properly known as the hellbender. I’ve seen them well over a foot long and weighing perhaps two pounds.
I really enjoy reading American Heritage and have passed on the September 1992 article about the two-party system ("The Lives of the Parties") to a few of my high-level Beninese contacts, including Benin’s President Nicéphore Soglo. This is a struggling new democracy that looks to both the United States and France for guidance in creating and strengthening the institutions required to support a democratic form of government. It has come a long way from the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship that brought economic ruin and untold human-rights abuses. Hence, 1 look forward to passing on other such articles that mirror America’s experiences. What better model than our country, which developed and managed the world’s longest uninterrupted government based on the two-party system.
Nicholas Delbanco resurrects the reputation of Count Rumford, the all-but-forgotten genius who as late as FDR’s day was considered one of the halfdozen greatest Americans ever. . .Guthrie, Oklahoma, remains a living monument to the boom-town spirit that built it . . . and, to keep you gainfully employed no matter how long and empty your Labor Day weekend, more.
Mark Carnes looks back past the yelps and tom-toms of the present men’s movement to find its roots in a national tradition of fraternal passion.
Jack Kemp is well known to be a Republican deeply committed to making the GOP again the party of Lincoln. He also was a central figure in the transition of that party from an organization still bearing the impress of Herbert Hoover to an exuberant populist force. In a frank and thoughtful interview, he discusses how the party has changed over the years and where it may be headed.