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.”
Dr. Schlesinger’s views, as always, will provoke much thought on this complex issue.
The dialogue on multiculturalism neglects one extremely important reason to add multicultural viewpoints and experiences to education: the need to educate members of the white majority about the trials and contributions of ethnic and racial minorities. The rise of racism across the United States in the last few years clearly demonstrates a woeful ignorance and intolerance toward persons of different races. A truly multicultural curriculum would neither shallowly celebrate “others” as heroes or pity them as victims; rather, it would provide historical and literary and political contexts for present-day race relations that could only contribute to tolerance and to a greater understanding of different cultural backgrounds. Multiculturalism, at its best, is an inclusive, not an exclusive, point of view.
The interview with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., by Fredric Smoler (February/March) on what America’s children should be taught about American history was very interesting.
I was particularly struck by Mr. Schlesinger’s statement that the Afrocentric curriculum proposed by the multiculturalists “withdraws blacks from America in favor of a fictitious connection with Africa.”
When I was a Peace Corps volunteer living in Burundi, Africa, I had an opportunity to witness the interaction between black Americans and black Africans. Except for the color of their skin, the two groups did not have any more in common than white Americans had with the Burundians. All the volunteers were united in their being Americans, as the Burundians were in being part of their group.
If a connection between black Americans and a supposedly united African culture is a fundamental tenet of multiculturalism, then this is one ism that is bound to fail.
I greatly enjoyed Nancy Shepherdson’s “Credit Card America” (November). The ubiquitous nature of the credit card was made evident to me during a trip to Morocco several years ago. After many hours of shopping in the endless maze of tents and stalls that constitute the medieval bazaar of Marrakech, I discovered that I had almost totally depleted my supply of both cash and traveler’s checks. Although I carried both major bank cards, none of the souks displayed any indication of acceptance of credit cards. Indeed, to my Western eye, the vendors, stalls, and the wares themselves appeared to be firmly anchored in the Middle Ages. I explained my predicament to our guide.
Undaunted, he led us a few steps up a dark passageway, opened the flaps of a dusty tent, and revealed to us … a bank! In no more time than it would normally take to make a deposit back home, I received a cash advance of several hundred dirhams with my Gold MasterCard. To this day the entire episode retains the surrealistic aura of an ad writer’s dream!
What would you do if you owned a Rembrandt that had been painted over by Picasso? A similar problem confronted the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in 1969 when it came into possession of Carter’s Grove, a mansion on Virginia’s James River that had been built between 1750 and 1755 and extensively remodeled in the 1930s. Should the house be restored to its original condition to portray the life and society of Virginia’s colonial aristocracy, or should it be preserved as it was received, to illustrate a more contemporary social milieu? In the mid-1980s, the directors of Colonial Williamsburg decided to preserve Carter’s Grove as it had stood in the 1930s—as one of America’s finest examples of the Colonial Revival style.
Some years back when our senior editor Carla Davidson was a picture editor, she cultivated the busman’s holiday hobby of collecting daguerreotypes. I liked to go with her to antiques shows and help look for them, because there is something immediate about this particular kind of photograph. The silver glitter of the surface has the flash of sunlight to it; the outdoor scenes are full of weather; there is a shining clarity that makes it easy to feel close to the people for all their strange, complex neckwear and gloomy dresses and clamped, rigid postures.
This made it all the more startling when I would open the gutta-percha case and find myself staring into the face of a dead child.
These mortuary photographs were quite common, but I never got used to them. It is—or should be—one of the guiding truisms that human beings remain basically the same from one generation to the next, but this custom of photographing corpses made me feel that the people who practiced it were ghouls. Carla had the same reaction; she never wanted one in her collection.
May is a month of traditions: of flowers and commencements, of the Kentucky Derby for 117 years and Indianapolis five-hundred-mile races for 81. For an automobile race, Indy is ancient. Back in 1911, it was an all-day affair, as the winner covered five hundred miles in six hours and forty-two minutes. These days winners complete the distance in less than three hours, the same oval unraveling for a driver with the same turns, banks, and exhilarating straights. Everything has been tried in American auto racing in nearly one hundred years, from unabashed blood sport to fine competition—to the delight of manufacturers, promoters, and drivers. And fans. With so much choice and change, fans are the great governing board in American racing, creating some traditions, like Indy, to last.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about modern medicine is just how very, very modern it is. Ninety percent of the medicine being practiced today did not exist in 1950. Just two centuries ago, medicine was an art, not a science at all, and people—whistling past the graveyard—joked that the difference between English doctors and French ones was that French doctors killed you while English ones let you die. Even sixty years ago there was usually little the medical profession could do once disease set in except alleviate some of the symptoms and let nature take its course.
When the distinguished physician and author Lewis Thomas was a young boy, in the 1920s, he often accompanied his physician father on house calls, and his father would talk with him about the patients he was seeing and the medicine he was practicing.