January 2011

The traditional Boston rocker was once described by the pioneer American furniture historian Wallace Nutting as “the most popular chair ever made, which people sit in, antiquarians despise and novices seek.” What distinguishes the classic Boston rocker from other rocking chairs are its gracefully scrolled seat, high spindled back, spool turnings, and rolling crest and headpiece. The first Boston rockers, which were as likely to have come from Connecticut as from Boston, were made of oak with solid pine seats. Like the one shown here, the early, handcrafted versions were painted and grained black and often embellished with stenciled fruit and flower decorations.

For general information about Asheville, call the North Carolina Division of Travel and Tourism (1-800-847-4862). For a schedule of local activities, contact the Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 1010, Asheville, NC 28802 (704-258-3858). This year Biltmore’s Festival of Flowers runs from April 11 to May 10 (1-800-543-2961). The Thomas Wolfe Festival, which includes lectures and readings, is held every October 3, the author’s birthday. For fanciers of folk art, the city hosts Guild Fairs in the summer and fall, and music lovers may enjoy the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in August.

Altamont had been settled soon after the Revolutionary war…. And, for several decades before the Civil War, it had enjoyed the summer patronage of fashionable people from Charleston and the plantations of the hot South.” Thus did Thomas Wolfe describe his hometown, Asheville, North Carolina, in his first, largely autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel . Located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and blessed with cool breezes and an abundance of natural beauty at a high altitude, Asheville still attracts summer guests. Yet if Thomas Wolfe were to return to Asheville today, he would find it much changed from the bustling little town he had observed from the front porch of his mother’s boardinghouse, The Old Kentucky Home.

A clipping selected at random from a generous stack tells me that the would-be Democratic candidate Tom Harkin is pitching a “populist, sharply partisan message.” I get the impression that the two adjectives are interchangeable. Another clip predictably calls David Duke a “populist.” That’s no surprise, either. I have heard the word applied to Jesse Jackson and Ronald Reagan in previous campaigns—in fact, to practically every candidate who did not outright propose restricting government to the rich, the wise, and the well born. Or, as my friend, the editor of this magazine has put it, to everyone who doesn’t hold an office or own a bank.

Exasperated, as he often was, by the French genius for dividing into multiple and irreconcilable political factions, Charles de Gaulle is reported to have once thrown up his hands and lapsed into apparent non sequitur. “Nobody,” he declared, “can simply bring together a nation that has 265 different kinds of cheese.”

Yet the greatest French statesman of this century seems truly to have discovered an underlying correlation between cheese and political instability. Consider the United States. It has produced only three great, uniquely American cheeses: Monterey Jack, brick, and Liederkranz. But, since 1789, it has also flourished under a single constitution. Meanwhile, France, with hundreds of cheeses, has run through three kingdoms, two empires, and five republics.

They’re at it again. As I write, a big, well-barbered pack of would-be presidents has already finished months of pestering the famously patient citizens of New Hampshire for their votes. By the time you read this, the surviving candidates, reduced in numbers but increased in volume, will have sound-bitten and photo-opped their way back and forth across the continent too many times to count, and if the past is any guide, we will all be pretty much agreed that the current presidential race is the worst ever—vulgar, empty-headed, unworthy of the world’s oldest democratic republic.

“I don’t want it”

Thus Harry Truman on the Vice Presidency of the United States. He was speaking in the summer of 1944, a few days before being pulled into the vortex that would bring him to the land’s highest office. Democratic delegates knew that they were nominating two Presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, who was unlikely to survive his fourth term, and whoever became his running mate. So the only real drama in the election was at the Democratic Convention—but it had drama to spare. In a fastpaced narrative full of tangy detail, David McCullough shows us FDR at his most devious, the old party-boss system at its zenith, and Harry Truman at the pivot of his career.

What we lost in the Great War

Nathan Ward’s October “Time Machine” submits that the eleven crewmen lost in the October 17, 1941, torpedoing of the Kearny were the first American servicemen to die in World War II. Although not well known outside the U.S. Army Air Corps Weather Service, it’s a fact that Capt. Robert M. Losey became the first American in the service of his country to die from hostile action in World War II more than a year earlier.

As the first chief commander of the Air Weather Service (since 1937), Captain Losey asked Gen. Hap Arnold to send him to Finland (which had been invaded by the Germans in 1939) to observe arctic aerial warfare firsthand. Arnold sent Losey to Finland in January 1940 as assistant military attaché for air. Later Losey was detailed to accompany the U.S. ambassador to Norway, Mrs. Florence J. Harriman, to that country. On April 21, after leaving Mrs. Harriman in a safe place, Losey went forward to observe the fighting and was killed instantly by shrapnel while watching a bombing raid on DombÅs.

In “My Brush with History” (November) Peter D. Baird writes an amusing story of his experience as an aircraft spotter while he was a grade schooler in Moscow, Idaho, during the early days of the Cold War in the 1950s. The impression one gets is of a slipshod operation.

But my experience in Bismarck, North Dakota, in 1953–54 was more positive. I was a-geologist there in the opening days of the Williston Basin oil boom and was recruited, along with a number of others from my company, to man the Air Force’s “filter center” at night. There we would receive calls from spotters like Mr. Baird, scattered over the state, and in turn we would relay the information to Rapid City Air Force Base.

Lawrence O’Brien, the head of the Democratic National Committee at the time of the Watergate break-in, was not the first O’Brien burglarized on behalf of the GOP. Forty-two years earlier, James J. O’Brien, a suspected Tammany Hall ally and two-bit blackmailer, was the target of another Republican administration. In 1930, however, the burglars were drawn not from the CIA and disgruntled Cuban émigrés, but from American Naval Intelligence. The mastermind behind this conspiracy was a millionaire friend of Herbert Hoover’s who was an officer in the Naval Intelligence Reserve and claimed to be acting under the President’s authority.

The main evidence for this strange story, so reminiscent of Watergate, appears in the recently uncovered diary of Glenn Howell, who, in 1930, was the director of Naval Intelligence for the New York City area. Howell was no stranger to break-ins and espionage against his fellow citizens. In his 1930 diary, he speaks confidently of infiltrating and spying on Communist cells and then arranging for break-ins and the theft of their files. But one particular job made him nervous.