January 2011

My father, David Keith Stewart, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and came to the United States at the turn of the century. He took a job in a bank, and soon he was asked to go to the small town of Edinburg, Indiana, thirty miles south of Indianapolis, to be manager of the Thompson Bank.

Soon after he arrived there the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of the Catholic Church. The next day a group of the wealthiest and most prominent men of the town came to the bank and asked to see my father. When ushered into his office, the spokesman said, “Mr. Stewart, we are the members of the Ku Klux Klan, and we have come to invite you to join us.”

“But,” replied my father with great personal relief, “I am not eligible to join your organization, gentlemen.”

“What!” exploded the spokesman. “Why not?”

“Because, I am foreign-born.”

And because the men had identified themselves, that was the end of Klan activities in Edinburg, Indiana.

I read with interest Bernard A. Weisberger’s article about the Ku Klux Klan in the April issue (“In the News”). I generally agree with everything he says after the first two paragraphs but I would offer the following additional information about one brief period of time. This information is admittedly third hand, gathered by my mother from, and about, her grandfather and passed on to me. An allowance must be made for distortion under these circumstances, a point offered in the spirit of full disclosure.

American Heritage recently asked a wide range of novelists, journalists, and historians to answer a question: what is your favorite American historical novel, and why? The results made two things clear: that the question was not nearly so simple as it sounded; and that it had been well worth asking. Herewith, a vital anthology that debates the nature of the historical novel and points you toward the best examples our culture has to offer.

Anthony Adverse, because it was the first one I read. After that, it was on to The Good Earth, Jean-Christophe, and historical novels of other lands because, by contrast, to seven-year-old me, the United States was boring. By contrast, I still think so.

—Shana Alexander, author, When She Was Good

Mr. Dubow has authored a fine, succinct piece on Asheville, which makes me very proud to know will be read by your many readers.

Despite its title, Memories of the Ford Administration, John Updike’s forthcoming novel is equally about two administrations—Gerald Ford’s and James Buchanan’s. The link between their dissimilar epochs is Alfred L. Clayton, Ph.D., a professor of history at Wayward Junior College in southern New Hampshire and a member of the Northern New England Association of American Historians. The book opens with a memo he is writing—in fact, it’s the entire text of that memo—“Re: Requested Memories and Impressions of the Presidential Administration of Gerald R. Ford (1974-77), for Written Symposium on Same to be Published in NNEAAH’s Triquarterly Journal, Retrospect.”

In the column “History Happened Here” (May/June) about Asheville, North Carolina, and Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel , the writer concludes with: “Those coming to see the little stone angel that was the inspiration for Wolfe’s first novel, however, do so in vain. Sadly, she no longer exists.”

About twenty-five miles south of Asheville, at Hendersonville, an official state historical marker reading “Wolfe’s Angel” stands on the road past the municipal cemetery, which contains a plot of several graves surrounded by a high iron fence. One of the graves is marked by an angel that is identified as the angel from W. O. Wolfe’s monument shop in Asheville—and the angel of the novel’s title. (It had been sold to a Hendersonville family named Johnson after W. O. Wolfe’s death.)

And it is not “a little stone angel.” Of white marble, the figure is full adult size (I was about to say “life size,” not very suitable for a spirit) and stands on a high pedestal.

John Updike’s article states that “during the 1920s formal post-mortem photography disappeared in mainstream middle-class America.” I am concerned that this might be painful to people who find such photographs to be an essential part of their grieving.

The practice of post-mortem photography remains so commonplace that a pamphlet has been published to assist nurses and doctors in the posing of dead children. The 1985 booklet, “A Most Important Picture,” was written by S. Marvin, Joy Johnson, James Cunningham, and Irwin J. Weinfeld and published by the Centering Corporation of Omaha. My own research indicates that many people take post-mortem photos of their dead children and parents and most professional photographers in the United States have had post-mortem portrait commissions.

The pictures of the dead children raise a troubling issue. Your various justifications for printing these pictures are full of high-minded rhetoric about historical attitudes toward death and what it can teach contemporary Americans. It can be argued, however, that what you are doing illuminates not a historical trend but a modern one—exploiting the tragedies and misfortunes of others for personal gain or entertainment.

My initial reaction to “Facing Death” in the May/June issue was to slam it shut and move on. But upon coming back to it, reading John Updike’s moving and trenchant commentary, and studying the faces, I agree that it was something that needed to be faced. Mr. Updike should have included reporters among those who regularly see death face-to-face.

Our modern ability to avoid the once-common face of death came home to me early in a ten-year career as a newspaper reporter in Tennessee. I covered police beats, which included visiting scenes of accidents. I recall most vividly watching one otherwise quiet Friday afternoon as rescue workers struggled to extract the body of a woman from a car. There was no immediately visible trauma; the woman’s face looked slack, as though she were heavily asleep.

Twenty-five years ago this November, I found myself in Ohio, where I was being awarded an honorary degree at Wilberforce University. The university, one of the few all-Negro institutions in the North, was named after William Wilberforce, the great British abolitionist of slavery, and so I marked the special appropriateness of this honor when I accepted the invitation a few weeks earlier. My novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, based on the Virginia slave revolt of 1831, had been published early in October to generally glowing reviews, had received a vast amount of publicity, and had quickly ascended to the top of the best-seller lists, where it would remain for many weeks. Only the most disingenuous of writers would, I think, fail to confess being pleased by such a reception.