I enjoyed “The Seventeenth Largest Army” by Gene Smith (December). It was so clearly written, accurate, informative, and very interesting! I do feel a little disturbed, though, that the impression is given that the only thing the United States had in the way of ground forces was that little Regular Army. We had the National Guard, who, by and large, were as well or better trained than the Regular Army. This is as it should be in the United States.
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January 2011
I was fascinated by the article “Lost in Space: What Went Wrong With NASA?” in the November 1992 issue of American Heritage . From 1977 to 1983 I was president of RCA American Communications, a pioneering satellite-communications carrier, and I had many contacts with NASA, which provided the launch services for our satellites. The comments in the article about the NASA shuttle program are absolutely correct, and I have something to add to them. The shuttle was alleged to be a cheaper way of launching satellites because the launch vehicle was reusable. We were very suspicious of this claim, first because of the need for added reliability of a manned vehicle and second because refurbishing is often more expensive than building anew.
For travel information, contact the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at 800-453-3860 and the Utah Travel Council at 801-538-1030 or write to the Travel Council at Council Hall, Capital Hill, Salt Lake City, UT 84114.
Even before one annual travel issue goes to the printer, we find ourselves thinking about the next. We try for balance—of subject, of location, of era. And yet the issue tends to take on a stubborn shape of its own, as if to say, “Forget about your usual notions of something for everyone; this is what I want to be.” Last year that brought us a collection of articles that a few of you thought was deliberately designed to be politically correct; we had a new look at General Custer, the old Jewish neighborhood of New York’s Lower East Side, and the South’s recent appreciation for African-American history. No P.C. intended; the issue simply went its own obstinate way.
On my first visit to Gilgal Garden, a back-yard collection of folk sculpture in Salt Lake City, a Mormon friend who shares my taste for the unusual took my picture. There I am, a smiling, middle-aged Gentile (as Mormons call all non-Mormons) seated on a large stone sphinx that has the face of Joseph Smith, the founder of the faith. I am sitting on the sphinx’s paw.
The Mormons frequently describe themselves as “a peculiar people,” so Gilgal Garden, being peculiar even by their standards, seemed like a good place to start a visit to the historic sites of Mormon Utah. (The Mormons have taken the term peculiar from the New Testament: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.”)
In 1883, Walt Whitman received an invitation to Santa Fe to deliver a poem at a celebration of the city’s founding. The ailing 64-year-old poet wrote back from his home in Camden, New Jersey that he couldn’t make the trip or write a poem for the occasion, but he sent along some remarks “off hand”: “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress’d by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion’d from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a very great mistake.”
The Terrible Year Begins
In March a strike by city garbage collectors had brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Memphis, Tennessee, where he hoped to lead the union’s action against the city government; on April 4, as he stood talking in the early evening with his friends on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the great civil rights campaigner was killed by a small-time holdup man and criminal bumbler named James Earl Ray. Ray, who had checked into Bessie Brewer’s rooming house nearby as “John Willard” and who was remembered by her only for his dark suit and “silly smile,” fired one 30.06-caliber shot from a bathroom window, 205 feet from King’s motel. By evening King was dead, Ray had slipped town for Canada, and riots burned from one end of the country to the other.
Following Fala
M-G-M gave President Roosevelt’s black Scottie, Fala, his own movie short, which followed the First Family’s dog through a typical White House day, from the arrival of his biscuit on the President’s breakfast tray through his visits with other White House staff. Although a look-alike Scottie had already costarred with William Powell and Myrna Loy in their popular Thin Man films, and Fala had been known sometimes to steal the show at FDR’s news conferences, this was his first movie role.
Monty’s Fashion Risk
War, Art, and Dancing
“Outside a woman walked along the wet street-lamp sidewalk through the sleet and snow,” began the eighteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway in one of his early efforts for the Kansas City Star . His admirable little story—turning an unremarkable evening of soldiers fox-trotting with young women from the Fine Arts Institute into something significant—ran on April 21. Young Hemingway had come to Missouri the previous October at his uncle’s urging and spent six months covering Kansas City’s “shortstop run,” seeking out newsworthy action along the strip from the hospital to the police house and Union Station. There were the usual brawl victims to interview in the emergency room, he could chase down a fire truck, or a man burning up with influenza might stagger off the train and cause a panic at the station.