January 2011

Abraham Lincoln himself once said that he did not understand the terrible war it fell on him to wage. The best explanation he could offer in his second inaugural for the carnage he seemed powerless to end was that “the Almighty has His own purposes.”

Americans in general and historians in particular have been trying to discover those purposes ever since the firing ended, their findings often casting more light on the time in which they were made than upon the time when all that blood was spilled. The race to discover what really happened between 1861 and 1865 shows no signs of slowing down, and three provocative recent books challenge three ancient myths about the war.

By the early 1880s a succession of traveling photographers had produced a stunning record of the American West, with its roughhewn cities and endless, astonishing landscapes. Their pictures decorated parlors and offices across the country—but not the printed page. Magazine and newspaper readers could see them only after they’d been translated into engravings.

In the middle of the eighties, however, the halftone process, which renders shades of gray in a tiny dot pattern, was refined to make it possible to incorporate photographic plates on the standard presses of books, magazines, and even newspapers. The considerable cost involved delayed widespread use by newspapers until the 189Os. But the way was opening for a new type of photographer, one with a reporter’s sense of news and a photographer’s technical and artistic skills—in today’s term, a photojournalist. Harry Hale Buckwalter was among the first of them.

Ordinarily streets and buildings on Army posts are history lessons. The Army is an institution that capitalizes upon its past, using its physical surroundings to commemorate its forebears and convey to its present members a sense of continuity and place. Over the years the Army’s custom of naming everything nameable has ensured that every road and most buildings speak to the inhabitants of these posts in subtle and constant tones. In this respect Fort Leavenworth is no different from any other post, but this is an old place, one that lays a special claim to the Army’s affections. Established in 1827, it is the oldest fort in continuous service west of the Missouri River, which courses below the bluffs where it stands. In 1881 the Army’s “university,” the Command and General Staff College, opened its first classes. Today few officers manage a career in the Army without seeing Fort Leavenworth. The place is frequently referred to as “the heart and soul of the American Army.”

I had long been of the opinion that this race had a right to kill rebels.” Colonel James M. Williams, commander of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry, always spoke, said a contemporary, as though he were “grinding his molars or gritting his teeth.” His regiment of escaped black slaves had been the first organized into service for the United States government, and he was determined that it give a good account of itself. They had already been the first blacks in combat in the Civil War and the first to die serving the flag. Williams had worked his men hard for months, had strong-armed civilian authorities to get his way, wedding his Puritan abolitionist fervor with a self-conscious sense of personal dignity. Now, the 1200 men of his command, camped for the night of July 1, 1863, at Cabin Creek, Indian Territory, were about to make history, and if Williams did not know it, he nonetheless had brought it to pass.

The Russian road to democracy is not going to be easy. In the 45-volume edition of Vladimir Lenin’s collected works, the index shows no entry for Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams, or James Madison. George Washington gets three mentions, but they all relate to well-wishers suggesting that Lenin is the George Washington of Russia. Monroe is listed four times—each time for the Monroe Doctrine, with nothing about the debates over the U.S. Constitution.

This striking indifference of the founder of the Soviet state to the American heritage of democracy and its authors is hardly a positive harbinger for the hopes of the many Russians (and their well-wishers on our shores) for the rise of a new and democratic state from the ruins of the dictatorship of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors.

Exactly 200 years after George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States and 300 years after Peter the Great’s ascent to the Russian throne, a new chapter opened in the history of the relations of the two greatest states of the world.

The United States and Russia never fought a war. Twice in the twentieth century, they were allies. Their governments and the structure of their societies have been very different, yet there are similarities in the character of the two countries. The relationships of the two states and of their peoples have often been interesting, rather than dramatic—the reason for this being the great geographic distance separating them (except in the Arctic), a dominant fact even now.

When Marsden Hartley painted this definitive homage to a cocktail in 1916, it was almost inevitable that he should choose the Manhattan as his subject. In his Stork Club Bar Book of 1946, Lucius Beebe, who by then had forged perhaps the most repellent prose style ever attempted by an American, explained: “Because of its unrivaled tonic qualities as a restorative and element for firming the moral fiber, as well as because of the prevailing American taste for drinks with whisky bases at this time, the classic and standard Manhattan cocktail, precisely as it is served at this red hot minute at the Stork Club, was an almost universal rite until the end of the nineteenth century.… Whatever may be the present vogue for Martinis … make no mistake about it: the Manhattan was the archetypal short mixed drink and blazed a trail for all others to follow.” Here is the Stork Club’s recipe:

The Baltimore and Ohio was the second railroad in the nation to acquire diesel locomotives when they began to make their appearance in the mid-1920s, but at first the newcomers served only as switch engines. Then, in 1935, the B&O bought a road diesel and hitched it to the Royal Blue streamliner, whose aluminum-alloy eight-car trains sped luxuriously between Washington, D.C., and New York City. Two years later the Capitol Limited inaugurated diesel passenger service between Washington and Chicago. As part of its drive to promote the new service, the B&O commissioned a marquee for a station in Baltimore and received this eloquent watercolor by way of a proposal. The service took: on the eve of World War Il the B&O had 37 diesels as well as some 2,000 steam locomotives; just twenty years later the line had 1,129 diesels and not a single steamer. In this moody nocturne, so skillfully painted by a renderer named Otto Kuhler, can be read a mighty theme: the demise of steam railroading in America.