I’ve very much enjoyed American Heritage for the past few years, but I found J. E. Vacha’s article “Dvořák in America” in the September 1992 issue especially interesting. In my role as weekend-afternoon personality on WNCN, 104.3 FM, “the new wave in classical radio,” I was more than happy to direct my listeners to this fine article.
Thomas Fleming replies: Mr. Nixon linked Truman with the Communists in literally hundreds of speeches. In her biography of Nixon, Fawn Brodie writes: “One looks back with ever greater incredulity at Richard Nixon’s success…at convincing so many Americans that Truman was a secret protector of a ‘Communist conspiracy’ in the United States.”
According to a newspaper clipping in the file of the Harry S. Truman Library, on October 18, 1952, in Utica, New York, and on October 27, 1952, in Texarkana, Arkansas, Nixon accused Truman of “covering up…an internal Communist conspiracy in the United States.”
Admittedly this is not quite saying Mr. Truman was a Communist. But considering the fact that Mr. Truman was eighty-six at the time and we both were talking with modest amounts of Bourbon in our glasses, I don’t think our conversation strayed too far from the truth.
In Thomas Fleming’s “Eight Days with Harry Truman” (July/August) he relates that President Truman said of President Nixon, “He called me a Communist, you know.” Mr. Fleming writes on, “I said I knew that.” Truman was eighty-six at the time, so one can hardly hold him to a strict standard of accuracy. And perhaps Mr. Fleming was simply humoring Truman by not disputing the claim then. But would Mr. Fleming now kindly tell us on what date, before what audience, Nixon called Truman a Communist?
As one who has had a lifelong interest in historic Western photographers, it came as a pleasant surprise to learn that one of the earliest, and most accomplished, had been unknown to me. Dr. James S. Brust and American Heritage are to be commended for a handsome introduction to the work of John H. Fouch. Some of his images are so remarkable as to elicit wonder at how he managed to achieve the lighting under any circumstances, let alone within a mud-chinked log hovel on the Yellowstone frontier. In particular, his seated portrait of the Nez Percé Chief Joseph is almost miraculous in its technical virtuosity. If one had to select the ten finest nineteenth-century photographs of American Indian people, surely this picture would be high on the list.
The New York City photos in the November issue are wonderful. They really reflect their period ( evocative —an overworked word—fits them perfectly), and I don’t know of any others like them. It is truly a discovery.
On the road again
Spring! The weather is softening, the roads are drying, and all of nature’s old blandishments that have been luring Americans out onto the highway forever are at it again. And with the season comes our annual issue devoted to historic travel. Among the destinations:
Mormon Utah
One of the most extraordinary of all American journeys came to an end at the Great Salt Lake, where Brigham Young decreed that his followers should found their Zion. Michael Durham, a Gentile (as all non-Mormons are known to Mormons), travels through the state and meets a people for whom history is of far more than academic interest.
Jefferson’s other home
Monticello was the reflection of the public Jefferson, Poplar Forest the private one—a country retreat as original and compelling as its builder.
Spanish America
by Barbara McCandless; Texas A&M University Press; 198 pages.
Trlica’s photographic career spanned the years 1924 to 1955, all in the small central Texas community of Granger. Home to a large Czech population, to which Trlica belonged, Granger seemed to reserve its greatest pride for its standing as “the Paved Street Town,” the first Texas community of less than five thousand able to make the claim. A new volume devoted to Trlica’s photographs weaves the strands of life in that small town. Scenes of Czech religious gatherings bump up against a view of the stage for a “Popular Lady” contest or the window display for shoes at Friendly Fives, which are all perched on oversize dice. Trlica’s fledgling career was helped along when the Eastman Kodak Company decided to extend its sway over smalltown and rural America with special traveling schools that gave tips to photographic entrepreneurs, thereby opening up a whole new market for the company’s wares.
Wolfgang Mieder, editor in chief; Oxford University Press; 736 pages.
The easy way to compile a dictionary like this one would be to buy eight or ten proverb collections already in print, select your favorites, and publish them as a brand-new book. The hard way—so hard, in fact, that it has never been attempted before on this scale—would be to spend decades listening to Americans speaking, taking note of every adage and aphorism. In the mid-1940s Margaret Bryant, chairperson of the American Dialect Society’s Committee on Proverbial Sayings, decided on the second approach. With no fixed publishing schedule in mind, she and her colleagues at the society began recording on slips of paper each proverb they heard spoken. In their definition of what was American they included English sayings and ones known all over the world, provided they were used in conversation here.