January 2011

At a press conference in Berlin shortly after World War II, General Lucius D. Clay, director of the military government of the American sector of defeated Germany, announced, “We are not here as carpetbaggers.”

While the word was carved on the heart of every American Southerner of his generation, it probably escaped most Germans entirely. But Clay’s Southern background would have a profound, and wholly beneficial, influence on the rebirth of Germany. One could almost call it the last great accomplishment of Sherman’s March to the Sea.

A four-star general who never fought a battle, Lucius D. Clay is, perhaps, an improbable American hero. But hero he certainly is. It was Clay who was the major impetus behind—and who organized and commanded—that decisive, bloodless victory, the Berlin airlift.

Good news and bad news come hurrying on each other’s heels these days. It was heartening, during last summer’s failed coup in the Soviet Union, to discover that the idea of democracy had dug itself in so deeply in the Soviet Union in the short time that it has been allowed an aboveground existence. But the latest headlines from Moscow sound a dire note. Freedom, this winter, may simply mean the license to starve—unless there is help.

Russian leaders are asking desperately for assistance in forestalling possible famine, and even hardline American anticommunists willing to let ordinary people go hungry just to prove the horrors of socialized agriculture are not immune to pragmatic arguments in favor of giving aid—arguments such as the need to avoid despair, discord, chaos, anarchy, and dictatorship in the “new” Russia, which will help no one. Or arguments such as the creation of a nice outlet for American food surpluses. Or the benefits of having an established and friendly American presence when Russia re-enters world markets.

In the spring of 1991 a number of interesting cruises along America’s East Coast were last-minute inspirations, dictated by the Persian Gulf War. Instead of plying their usual Mediterranean routes, such lines as Cunard and Royal Viking sent ships to Charleston and Savannah, Baltimore and Boston. Some of these trips will be repeated in 1992, now that the lines have had a chance to gauge their popularity. Passengers were surely aware that a war in the Mideast had prompted their ship’s American itinerary, but most of them probably didn’t know that the exact and sometimes odd configuration of their cruise was dictated by a 1920s law of Congress informally known as the Jones Act, which was designed to protect American merchantmen.

Clipper Cruise Line will travel the Intracoastal this spring and fall (1-800-325-0010), as will another small line, American Canadian Caribbean (1-800-556-7450). In 1991 several lines with ships too large for the Intracoastal also visited Southern ports. These included Royal (1-800-622-0538), Cunard (1-800-221-4770), and Royal Viking (1-800422-8000). One of the Royal Viking Sun ’s trips was felicitously timed to allow passengers to attend Baltimore’s Preakness Stakes and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. As of this writing, plans for spring 1992 aren’t set, but it’s worth checking to see if anything similar is on the schedule.

Shakespeare was mild about the lawyers (“The Business of America,” September). Consider the New Testament, Luke 11-46: (And He said) “Woe to you lawyers also!/ For you load men with burdens hard to bear/ And you yourselves do not touch the/ Burdens with one of your fingers.”

“Everything You Need to Know About Columbus,” by Gloria Deák (October), is popular history writing at its best. I was amazed to realize how much I didn’t know about one of the bestknown figures in American history and had never even thought to ask. Gloria Deák has given us the questions, provided the answers, and then tied it all together with a superb use of historical images. Bravo!

Amid the commotion surrounding the coming Columbus quincentennial, it was most helpful to find solid information on Columbus as a man of his own times, and not as a symbol of the controversies of today.

Gloria Deák has brought an overly familiar but dimly understood age into sharp focus. The force of the article’s language and format cuts through myth and stereotype to reveal a balanced and convincing view of this world-expanding event. It is a rare pleasure to find an article with the scope and immediacy of Ms. Deák’s.

When Gloria Deák writes of “the ancient biblical notions that the earth was a flat disk with Jerusalem in the center and that one could fall off the edge,” she fails to differentiate between what some early Christians believed and what the Bible actually states. Nowhere does the Bible say that the earth is flat.

Americans have never been comfortable with class. We like to think of ourselves as egalitarian, meritocratic. Joseph Alsop never for a moment suffered from this delusion, and his sunny, posthumous memoir, I’ve Seen the Best of It, is—among other things—an insider’s irresistible record of a time when men of the class he called the “Wasp Ascendancy” still seemed likely to remain in charge of an America that he and they believed could only improve under their steady, confident tutelage.

He was born Joseph Alsop V in 1910, the grand-nephew of Theodore Roosevelt, the collateral descendant of one Tory who quit the Continental Congress because it dared sever relations with Great Britain, and the direct descendant of another who, according to family legend, during the Revolution kept a portrait of George III in his wine cellar, so that he could lead his children before it in the evenings, commanding, “Bow to your master.”