January 2011

When people spoke about oil refineries in the 1850s, they meant whale oil, and here is Samuel Leonard, sitting on a keg in the yard of his New Bedford, Massachusetts, works, doubtless conducting business with the sagacity that made him the nation’s leading oilman. Supplying him and his colleagues are some seven hundred world-girdling vessels chasing an ever more elusive quarry: the sperm whale represented on the factory’s weather vane. William Allen Wall, a neighbor and good friend of Leonard, painted him and his prosperous domain in 1855.

We people spoke about oil refineries in the 1850s, they meant whale oil, and here is Samuel Leonard, sitting on a keg in the yard of his New Bedford, Massachusetts, works, doubtless conducting business with the sagacity that made him the nation’s leading oilman. Supplying him and his colleagues are some seven hundred world-girdling vessels chasing an ever more elusive quarry: the sperm whale represented on the factory’s weather vane. William Alien Wall, a neighbor and good friend of Leonard, painted him and his prosperous domain in 1855.

Until well into this century no woman would venture into public without a hat, and buying a new one was one of the ritual pleasures of spring. In this canvas, painted about 1905 by Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, shoppers crowd the counters at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. Some thirty years earlier, when John Wanamaker opened his huge Grand Depot at Thirteenth and Market streets, one editorial writer expressed the view that he was walking “on the thin crust of a volcano which threatens to blow him and his wigwam sky-high, scattering hats and haberdashery … to the four winds.” In fact, the retailer was so successful that in 1911 he built a twelve-story skyscraper on the same site, and the firm continues in business there today.

“What do I want to go back for?” Prewitt said wonderingly. “I’m a soldier. ”

“A soldier, ” Alma said. “A soldier. ” She began to laugh. “A soldier, ” she said helplessly. “A Regular. From the Regular Army. A 30-year-man. ”

“Sure, ” he said.

—James Jones, From Here to Eternity

Hail a cab in the 1930s and you might find yourself with a plush Packard, a roomy Checker, a De Soto with a sunroof, or a Hudson Terraplane with the classiest chassis this side of the Atlantic. All had leather upholstery and jump seats.

You can see some of these metered chariots in my drawing of Times Square, circa 1938. Note the logos painted on the rear doors. Each company had its own emblem and its own color combination. Color schemes took on significance after the First World War, when one New York taxi fleet lowered its rates to thirty cents a mile and painted its cabs brown and white so the public could seek them out. But then other taxi owners with higher rates painted their taxis brown and white. The lawsuit that followed went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decreed that colors could not be trademarked.

Daniel Aaron is right when he suggests in his essay “What Can You Learn from a Historical Novel?” that the interest that readers may have in certain novels might awake, and feed, their interest in history. But his use of the term historical novel is too narrow.

The Vidal and DeLillo books that Aaron cites are not appropriate. These writers are interested in history, sometimes deeply so; but their creations are flawed, as they are confections of a transitory, and sometimes fraudulent, genre that people might accept for “history” (as also happens with many films). Tolstoy once wrote that the historian is a frustrated novelist. In our times, and surely in the case of the above-mentioned writers, novelists may be frustrated historians.

“Truth and Fiction” is the most deadly boring issue in the history of your magazine. What ever happened to real history?

A generation after the civil rights movement of the sixties, and after years of revisionist work on Reconstruction, there are still some authors who tout Gone with the Wind as their favorite historical novel. (One would hope that they have also read its antithesis, the fine novel by Margaret Walker, Jubilee .) Whatever some feminists may say about Scarlett O’Hara as a gutsy woman, I find the novel’s elevation of the Klan totally offensive. As W. E. B. Du Bois remarked when the book came out, it was a distorted view of Reconstruction that justified the disenfranchisement of an entire people.

In this space back in July, we bade farewell to our colleague Julia Trotman as she left for the Olympics to represent the United States at the helm of a Europe 1I Dinghy. Now we are proud to report that she did nobly, seizing first place several times in the seven-race competition, and bearing home a Bronze Medal for Europe Class yachting.