January 2011

Chicago was host to the Republican National Convention May 20 and 21, where delegates picked their first presidential candidate since Lincoln. The gathering was a triumph for the late President’s greatest general, Ulysses S. Grant, who was approved on the first ballot.

Following their success as doled out in the serial magazine Student & Schoolmate during 1867, Horatio Alger’s tales of a pious, lucky newsboy named Ragged Dick were published together in May by the Boston publisher A. K. Loring. Alger would write at least 119 more stories about scrupulously strong boys like Dick, with titles like “Sink or Swim,” “Do and Dare,” “Facing the World,” and “Risen from the Ranks.” With their wicked stepfathers, timely benefactors, and clean message, the stories weren’t so far from Dickens, except in the writing and the temperament. The books proved a favorite with American boys for decades, selling more than seventeen million copies.

Every so often, one comes across a writer who should be awarded the literary equivalent of the Victoria Cross or the Medal of Honor—one who gazes into the jaws of a hellish assignment and goes forward, resolute paragraph after resolute paragraph, knowing that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, that the end will be cruel and the reward negligible.

Such a man is J. L. O. Tedder, the author of Walks on Guadalcanal. I picked up his 62-page booklet at the government tourist office in Honiara, the principal city of Guadalcanal, as well as the capital of the independent nation known as the Solomon Islands.

Editor’s note: In last year’s July/August issue we ran on the cover a photograph of World War I British soldiers making their way forward toward barbed wire during what the caption identified as the Battle of the Somme. In fact, as several readers wrote to remind us, the British film historian Kevin Brownlow established that although the picture was taken from a 1917 movie about the Somme that is otherwise composed of authentic footage, this vivid scene was most likely shot at a British trench-mortar battery school, safely behind the lines.
The Drug Debate The Drug Debate The Drug Debate The Drug Debate Cigarette Century Cigarette Century Cigarette Century Buffalo Soldier The Radical Revolution Bad Night at Deerfield

After the Mexican War ended, in 1848, landholders in the vast stretches of the Southwest ceded to the United States were allowed to keep their property and assume American citizenship. To establish their title to the land, they filed illustrated plats with the federal government. With this vivid sketch, drawn in 1852, Jose Rafael Gonzales laid passionate claim to his tree-studded, mountain-encircled San Miguelito ranch in central California. Today we sometimes underestimate Spain’s influence, not only on our surroundings but on the American character itself. An article on the Spanish legacy appears within.

For the past several days, I have been traveling from Dover, New Jersey toward Fort Washington, Ohio with my great-great-great-grandmother.

We left on the May 9, 1804, with a wagon drawn by a team of oxen and with horses for the men to ride—or so I surmise. The diary that three-times-great grandmother Phoebe Ford Marvin kept is not particular about such matters as who rode alongside and who drove, but deduction from her narrative leads me to feel that she had the reins part of the time. She also had her mother and a baby to care for on the way and the household money to handle and account for.

She is the first American woman of her time whom I have come to know—opinionated, game, sharp-eyed, moral rather than religious, not uncomplaining but certainly persevering, and a wonderful, head-on speller of whatever words she wanted.

One of the most recent and most impressive monuments in Washington, D.C. is in fact nearly two centuries old. Three miles east of the Capitol, the U.S. National Arboretum’s 444 densely planted acres fall away from Mount Hamilton to open out into a great meadow, and there, silhouetted against a curtain of dark, blue-green beech trees, stands a choir of 22 massive sandstone pillars. Mysterious and beautiful, the 30-foot-high, ten-ton shafts might be some relic of classical antiquity. But they were born right near here, for a while they held up the east front of the Capitol building, and for nearly 30 years, they were rubbish.

I well recall the Springmaid ads mentioned in your “Business of America” section of the December issue. The one I remember best showed two Indian braves signaling to an Indian maid across a river, asking, the caption explained, “Minne Haha if she’ll come across for two bucks and bring a friend.”

In scoffing at horses, Mr. Smith overlooks the fact that in World War II both Germans and Russians used many, in both horse cavalry and field artillery. The Russians are said to have ended with fifty horse-mounted divisions, and the very last successful horse-mounted charge was by a Polish squadron fighting for the Russians in Pomerania on March 1, 1945. The American infantry used pack mules in Italy, and a Filipino horse-mounted regiment, with white West Point officers, fought effectively on Bataan. Throughout the war our Mexican border was guarded by a horse-mounted black regiment.