January 2011

The article on boxing (October) was excellent, but I was sorry it did not bear more on the relationship of prize fighting to American ethnicity.

As you pointed out, America was not ready for a black heavyweight champion of the world when Jack Johnson won the title in 1908. But at least America could tolerate a black man as world champ by the time Joe Louis claimed the throne. More important, the black man had moved into the ghetto occupied by an earlier generation of white kids who were using their fists to fight their way out. Between 1901 and 1935 young pugs named Rosenberg, Goldstein, Kaplan, Rosovsky (Barney Ross), Rosenbloom, and Singer showed that Jews were among the current occupants, along with the Grazianos and Lamottas of a few years later. Prize fighting will always be a measure of who lives in the ghettos of America.

I am angry. I was shocked and ashamed that your October issue featured an article and cover on boxing. The same civilized society that forbids bullfights, dogfights, cockfights, and bearbaiting encourages and highly remunerates human beings to maim, cripple, and occasionally kill one another. The promoters and participants should be charged with felonious assault and battery.

About 325,000 jazz performances have been recorded for commercial release in the 20th century, according to the Institute for Jazz Studies, at Rutgers University. Thousands more have been taken from radio and concert events. Unknown billions of jazz records have been sold. But it was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) that made and sold the first jazz records 75 years ago this month (now reissued in a diamond-jubilee edition by RCA Bluebird).

There is a special badge of immortality we pin on those who are the first at something important. They don’t have to be the best, the biggest, or the most enduring. Being first is enough, as long as what they’re first at comes to count for something. Sometimes we know from the start it counts. When the Spirit of St. Louis bounced onto Le Bourget Field in 1927, our sense of time and distance changed.

1. “Dippermouth Blues” (1923)

King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, R 001). The Creole Jazz Band sides, of which “Dippermouth” is the most famous, constitute the first important black jazz recordings. New Orleans jazz was a thoroughly settled idiom, and Oliver a primeval piece of the true cross. In these acoustic, toylike ensembles, however, you can hear the sound of Louis Armstrong demanding to be born.

2. “Tight Like This” (1928)

Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces/Louis Armstrong, Vol. 4 CK 45142). Every great artist creates an occasional microcosm of every strength he possesses and by extension implies everything else he will ever play. Here Armstrong gives jazz a dramatist’s sense of emotional pacing. From a brooding stillness he stirs tentatively, takes hold, and climbs toward a cathartic release of operatic grandeur.

3. “The Blue Room” (1932)

William E. Leuchtenburg’s article “The Conversion of Harry Truman” (November) leaves out one of the major reasons for Truman’s surprising support for civil rights—the Wallace campaign.

Henry Wallace took a far more aggressive stand on civil rights than Truman. Although Wallace did poorly in the election, early in the campaign it was widely believed that he could capture a significant portion of the Democratic vote. Like a good politician, Truman sought to steal Wallace’s thunder.

Leuchtenburg’s thesis diminishes the import of Truman’s intense hostility to civil rights by omitting mention of what Truman did as President to destroy the movement of the 1940s.

Your article on Truman tarnished the memory of a great American, and I am sick of these smearing tactics àla Bush and his henchmen. I am a longtime subscriber and one thing I expect of the people running American Heritage is political impartiality. Since the Forbes family took over, a touch of right-wing Republicanism is apparent.

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