January 2011

John M. Bozeman of Georgia was twenty-five when he went to the hills of southwestern Montana in the gold rush of 1862 and failed to get rich. Convinced there must be more money in miners than in mining, he left the goldfield in 1863 to blaze a trail there and guide others along it. He laid out the Bozeman Trail starting in central Wyoming; the depredations of the Sioux along the way were so bad that it soon was known as the Bloody Bozeman, and the trail was abandoned by 1868. But before then Bozeman finally had an idea that stuck: In 1864 he founded a town in the valley just east of the gold mines to feed and otherwise serve and make money from the adventurers in the hills—and whoever later settled in the area.

I read the article about Liederkranz cheese in the May/June issue (“The Business of America”) with dismay, tinged with nostalgia.

I thought I was the only one who missed Liederkranz. I remember when I was a young man, my family would spread newspapers on the dining-room table and we would peel boiled shrimp from a big pot in the middle of the table. Radishes and beer went with the meal, but the essential accompaniments were loaves of crusty bread and Liederkranz.

I’ve tried to substitute other kinds of ripe cheese for Liederkranz, but nothing else works.

I believe, with Proust, that nothing is as evocative as smells, and nothing smells like Liederkranz. It is sad to think that it is lost forever. Could we bring a class action against General Foods?

Buried Alive The Spirit of America

by Walter Karp; Franklin Square Press; 279 pages.

Walter Karp died three years ago this July after a brief illness at the age of fifty-five. His passing deprived this magazine’s readers of a fine series called “A Heritage Preserved,” in which he illuminated the nation’s great museums through an examination of the personalities of the men and women who built them. It also deprived this nation of one of the most dedicated defenders of its liberties.

It is in this latter capacity that he wrote most of the essays in this anthology—although, like George Orwell, he felt that everything he wrote was in some sense political, speaking as he did always to the genius of the individual in society, to the interests of the people as opposed to those of the state. He expressed his views with a conviction that could leave one feeling tepid, waffling, and insincere by comparison; yet keeping company with Walter made you proud to be a citizen of this Republic.

by Barbara MiIo Ohrbach; Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.; 56 pages.

“We all do share a uniquely American spirit that goes back to the very beginning,” writes Barbara MiIo Ohrbach in this jaunty little compendium of Americana. She taps many sources to invoke that spirit: recipes for traditional fare; bright patriotic chromolithographs; the words of famous Americans; lists of state birds, flowers, and trees; and selections from popular songs and poems, among the latter the entire text of the history of America that Winifred Sackville Stoner assembled from clanging couplets, only the first of which is remembered today: “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”

In the course of this lethal century, death has been rendered increasingly abstract—a choreographed plunge on the television screen, the punch of a red button in a bomber or a computer game, a statistic in a column of print. The constant flicker of electronic sounds and images that surround us constitutes a mental environment as insulating as the buzzing belief systems of animism, Islam, or medieval Christianity.

This splendid sterling goblet, twenty inches across at the top and nearly two feet tall, is the Vanderbitt Cup—a trophy whose name still resonates with the thunder of the powerful, square-snouted machines that pounded over the back roads of Long Island eighty years ago. The first Vanderbitt Cup race was run in 1904, but an American didn’t get his name on the cup until 1908, when George Robertson won it in his Locomobile.

The race became increasingly lethal and petered out around the time of the First World War. Today the cup is in the National Museum of American History, which hopes someday to acquire Robertson’s Locomobile as well. For more on America’s auto-racing past, see the story within.

Dr. Schlesinger’s views, as always, will provoke much thought on this complex issue.

John Lukacs’s piece on America and Russia in the February/March issue is a concise and thorough synopsis of the relationship between the two nations since the birth of the United States. But the author is understating severely when he describes the American intervention after World War I as “short-lived and marginal; there was practically no fighting between American soldiers and the Red Army.”