January 2011

I thoroughly enjoyed and was greatly edified by the discussion of learning history through reading literature in your October issue.

But one repeated misconception must be corrected. When George F. Will, speaking in effect for many of the other contributors, cites All the King’s Men as an example of “novels obviously telling the story of a real life,” he is in disagreement with the book’s author.

In his 1953 introduction to the Modern Library hardback edition, Robert Penn Warren states that “for better or for worse, Willie Stark was not Huey Long. …

Historical Novels: The Readers’ Turn Historical Novels: The Readers’ Turn Historical Novels: The Readers’ Turn Historical Novels: The Readers’ Turn Historical Novels: The Readers’ Turn Historical Novels: The Readers’ Turn Historical Novels: The Readers’ Turn Historical Novels: The Readers’ Turn Announcing: The Cooper Prize

The patient at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis in 1919 might have wondered during his last days why all the physicians were so peculiarly interested in his case. When the man died, Dr. George Dock, chairman of the department of medicine, asked all third-and fourth-year medical students at the teaching hospital to observe the autopsy. The patient’s disease had been so rare, he said, that most of them would never see it again. The disease was lung cancer.

Dr. Alton Ochsner, then one of the students, wrote years later, “I did not see another case until 1936, 17 years later, when in a period of six months, I saw nine patients with cancer of the lung. Having been impressed with the extreme rarity of this condition seventeen years previously, this represented an epidemic for which there had to be a cause. All the afflicted patients were men who smoked heavily and had smoked since World War I. … I had the temerity, at that time, to postulate that the probable cause of this new epidemic was cigarette use.”

“EwrĠe Pöbels in the Nord america bin the werĠe fein Leyds,” wrote Georg Daniel Flohr, composing in very broken English a preface to his memoir of his time as a soldier in the American Revolution. “All the people of North America are fine people.” Sometime in the summer of 1788, in Strasbourg, France, Georg Flohr put down his pen, having completed about 250 pages of script in his native German (except for the English prologue) and some thirty extraordinary illustrations. He titled his volume Account of the Travels in America Which Were Made by the Honorable Regiment of Zweibrücken on Water and on Land from the Year 1780 to 1784.

What was the American Revolution really like, for real homes and real families caught up in its hardships and dangers? It is over two centuries since that famous “hurry of hoofs in a village street … the voice in the darkness, the knock at the door” alarmed our now-distant ancestors, and the vast literature of that war tells us very little about how it was for plain people—matters rarely recorded in the days before there were news media, feature writers, television coverage, and a history industry. We have lost human contact.

The French Revolution followed American independence by six years, but it was the later event that went into the books as “the Great Revolution” and became the revolutionary archetype. It is not only the contrast of the conspicuously greater political violence of the French Revolution that has led historians to play down the comparative radicalism of its American counterpart but the fact that the French Revolution swiftly became the model for radical political transformation. For more than a century successful revolutionaries no sooner took power than they designed tricolors and located themselves to the “left” or “right,” terms that originally denoted where the delegates sat in the French Convention; the French taught succeeding generations the revolutionary drill. Until the Russian Revolution displaced it, the French Revolution formed the dominant modern political myth, the distorting mirror in which posterity located its dreams and dreads.

Any magazine editor can tell you about the mysterious way certain issues seem to take on a life of their own, overrule your decisions, turn stubborn and idiosyncratic. I’d thought right along I had a pretty good handle on this one, and I was startled when, with press time looming, a colleague congratulated me on a festive holiday number that managed to include a disquisition on the perils of smoking, a look at social disease in the military, and a lot of warfare. Even as I rather lamely protested, “There’s taxicabs,” I took the point. But even so, looking the issue over, I find that a good deal of its contents seems somehow to chime properly with the season.

Enrico Fermi had come to Chicago in the spring of 1942 to lead the effort to construct the world’s first atomic pile, of blocks of graphite and uranium metal. The Manhattan Project scientists under Fermi’s leadership worked for months in secret beneath the stadium stands at the University of Chicago, built their pile in November, and, on December 2, achieved a faint but hugely significant self-sustained nuclear reaction with it.

The Supreme Court ruled on December 21 to validate that new American tradition, the Las Vegas divorce, forcing the other states to honor these quickie agreements as binding.

On December 30, 1942, New York’s Paramount Theater was packed for Frank Sinatra—the young balladeer from across the river in Hoboken, home from tours with Tommy Dorsey—when a young admirer in the twelfth row did something provocative: She passed out from a combination of hunger and excitement. This shocked a second girl, who screamed, and so they began, standing and screaming one after another as teen-age hysteria surged through the house. While no doubt aware of the rising noise from his listeners, Sinatra kept on singing until most of the audience was on its feet in wailing tribute.

The public had adored Bing Crosby before him, but never as loudly as this. Although it might be true, as Sinatra said himself, that he could sing any “son of a bitch off the stage,” tonight it suddenly didn’t matter what he sounded like. He had become a teen-age idol, whatever that was. He played the Paramount eight more weeks while the audience stood and squealed to the rafters all around him.