Dr. Schlesinger’s views, as always, will provoke much thought on this complex issue.
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January 2011
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.”
In his article about feeding Russia (“In the News,” February/March), Bernard A. Weisberger offers a dramatic account of Herbert Hoover’s brilliant campaign as Secretary of Commerce to combat famine in the newly formed Soviet Union. Although Hoover despised the Russian Revolution, he also understood the danger inherent in resting American security and welfare exclusively on a trial of strength with another nation. He saw food shipments to Russia as a chance to show that “capitalism was on the side of development.” So, he wrote, America could “take the leadership in the reconstruction of Russia when that moment arrives.”
The analogy is important: one doesn’t have to be soft on communism to recognize the importance of doing all we can to ease the Soviet peoples through the current crisis.
But Hoover’s prescience should not be overemphasized. The same Quaker gentleman who fed Russia also deprived a starving Germany of food to coerce unconscionable concessions after World War I. The result was the “turnip winter,” and a level of misery which Hitler freely exploited en route to his eleven million votes.
Miss Beatrice Fairfax:
Dear Madam: I read that you will advise young persons concerning their love affairs. I want your advice. I came from Ireland six months ago. A young man whom I have known since I was a little girl asked me to promise to marry him. … It was breaking my heart to come away, and I loved him dearly when he asked me. So I said yes. He is to come over as soon as he gets enough money. When I reached this country I met another young man at my married sister’s. I have been to some picnics with him, and I see him often, and I think I have fallen in love with him. It will kill my friend in Ireland if I am not true to him, and it will kill me if I have to be. Please advise me.
Nora
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.
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.
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!
Rush to Judgment
May’s Esquire offered a review of twenty-five alternative theories grown up around the assassination of President Kennedy since the Warren Commission’s report, bringing the total to sixty scenarios in all.
The review ranged from the Warren Commission member Arlen Specter’s suggestion that original autopsy pictures had been destroyed to arguments over alleged puffs of smoke, ricocheted bullet fragments, and differing numbers of shots fired on that terrible afternoon (the historian William Manchester, the late President’s biographer, claimed there had been two shots despite some hundred witnesses in Dallas who heard three).
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.