January 2011

There is something irresistible about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the soft-spoken, be-spectacled Bowdoin College professor who somehow transformed himself into one of the Union Army’s ablest commanders. He was one of the protagonists in Michael Shaara’s vivid novel about Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, and the real hero of John J. Pullen’s fine history of Chamberlain’s regiment, The Twentieth Maine, and when Ken and Ric Burns and I were working on the script for the PBS series The Civil War, he was among the soldiers whose exploits we followed most eagerly.

The radical revolution

For years many have held that France had the real revolution, and that ours was mild by comparison. But now the historian Gordon Wood has challenged this in a major new book, and in an interview he tells us why he thinks that the American revolution was the most sweeping in all history, the only one that really remade the world. A companion article offers a remarkable grunt’s-eye view of the struggle’s last campaign, the newly discovered memoir of a private who marched with the Army that took Yorktown, and left not only a vivid account of it all but a superb folk-art record of what he saw.

The seventeenth-largest army

I have just read with great interest the article on Colorado’s Lakeside amusement park that ran in your July/August issue. It poignantly reflects the uniqueness of this eighty-four-year-old family-run park and all that it has to offer, and I hope it may inspire your readers to visit our beautiful city and see the park for themselves.

John Steele Gordon’s “What We Lost in the Great War” begins as required reading for anyone who would understand our century. But then it plummets into anti-intellectualism and laissez-faire apologetics. First, those he credits with creating Western thought were themselves intellectuals, as much maligned in their times as were, later, those he castigates. Second, the idea that “class divisions within a society” have “no real-world analogue” could only occur to someone doing quite well, thank you, from the existing situation. Saying there are no classes because Marx’s simplistic dualism of bourgeoisie and proletariat did not work out in practice is like saying there are no subatomic particles because the situation is more complicated than protons, neutrons, and electrons.

I finished “What We Lost in the Great War” with a shock of nonrecognition. This is not because of Gordon’s sensible conclusions about the cataclysmic effects of World War I but because of his panegyric to the nineteenth century’s discovery of democracy and capitalism simultaneously, each dependent upon the other. Democracy flourished in the age of unrestrained plutocracy? I beg to differ. For over a generation, whichever political party won the meaningless elections merely strengthened the economic status quo. Was it the unenforced and unenforceable Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 that started to stem the power of wealth? Or was it the Progressive Era, of the early twentieth century?

After a lifetime of researching, writing, and teaching American history, I find the nineteenth century no golden age to be reattained, nor, despite the country’s overall triumphant success story, has there ever been any such desire, except perhaps in the post-Civil War South.

by William Poundstone; Doubleday; 290 pages.

In 1950 Life magazine quoted the great Hungarian-American physicist John Von Neumann, co-father of both the atom bomb and the digital computer, advocating immediate pre-emptive nuclear war against Russia: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” He was hardly alone. Generals and members of Congress were making the same arguments. So, most remarkably, was the British genius Bertrand Russell, today remembered as a crusading pacifist. In 1945, just after Hiroshima, he wrote that “there is one thing and one only which could save the world, and that is … that America should make war on Russia during the next two years, and establish a world empire by means of the atomic bomb.”

Two weeks after completing a film, in 1989 on the Johnstown Flood I received word from a woman in New London, New Hampshire that she had some photographs I might like to see.

Since it was too late to revise or change the film, my call to Virginia Anthony Cooper was more out of curiosity than self-interest. Cooper, it turned out, is the great-granddaughter of Charles J. Clarke, a prominent Pittsburgh businessman, who, in the 1880s, with the Carnegies, Mellons, and Pricks, was a member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an exclusive vacation retreat located on a man-made mountain lake fourteen miles above the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

It was the dam there, owned and maintained by the club, that failed on the afternoon of May 31, 1889, sending 4.5 billion gallons of water down the narrow Conemaugh Valley, devastating the city of Johnstown and claiming the lives of more than 2200 men, women, and children.

I have rarely read such a well-written and interesting analysis of what the First World War meant to Western civilization (“What We Lost in the Great War,” July/August). John Steele Gordon makes accurate and cogent points throughout his piece, and it is refreshing to read an author who is unafraid to point to the war’s devastating effects that occurred away from the battlefield and who does not automatically condemn the values of the society that fought the conflict.

I had waited six months to see it. A long-time collector, I loved to roam the monthly swap meet in Long Beach, California near my home. Half a year before, I’d stopped at the booth of a dealer in old photographs and asked if he had anything related to General Custer or to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, both favorite topics of mine. He told me that he had a stereo view of the Custer Battlefield, but he hadn’t brought it with him, and it wasn’t for sale. “It’s by a photographer I’ve never heard of,” he explained. “I think I’ll just hold on to it.” Each month, I’d inquire again. Finally, he agreed to bring it for me to see.