January 2011

Lincoln once said that three things only make up a nation: its land, its people, and its laws. When the 13 colonies declared independence, they suddenly found themselves, at least in theory, with hardly any laws at all. To meet the emergency, they quickly enacted legislation declaring the common law of England, which was in effect before July 4, 1776, to be once again the law of the newly sovereign states.

But, as the nation developed, the common law had to be adapted to suit American conditions. The complicated laws of land tenure, for instance, a holdover from feudal days, were drastically simplified. Other changes came about for purely political reasons. One of these was the early adoption of the so-called American rule in this country’s courts. Under this rule, each side of a lawsuit pays its own legal costs, regardless of who wins. Under the English rule the losing side pays the costs of litigation.

It’s vice-presidential agony time again. President Bush’s heart went into arrhythmia, and the media immediately went into fibrillations of their own, with headline and top-of-the-hour stories on Dan Quayle and other 1992 vice-presidential “hopefuls” on every front page, cover, and channel. When a president’s health falters, we all get a grim reminder of the mortal reason for the vice president’s being there. Forty men have held the office of president. Nine of them were vice presidents who, in every case but one, took over from suddenly dead predecessors. Those are scary odds.

Some people are especially scared of this particular vice president—about 62 percent of respondents in one early-May poll. They reported themselves as “worried” if Quayle had to fill Bush’s shoes. As a result, there is a “dump-Dan” movement simmering in advance of the 1992 election.

Crossing the Kennebec River into Bath, you immediately notice “Number Eleven,” a fourhundred-foot-tall red-and-white-striped crane that dominates the low, leafy town. This landmark may be rather homely, but it signals the shipbuilding prowess that distinguishes Bath from its quainter lobstering neighbors along the Maine coastline. Known for years as the City of Ships, Bath has launched more oceangoing vessels from its milelong riverfront stretch than any other area of comparable size in the world.

“Bath must have been a fine place to live in, a century ago,” Robert Tristam Coffin wrote in a 1937 history of the Kennebec River. “The streets smelled of far countries. The shop windows were pages of a geography book. And all day long there was music through the air, the sound of a thousand wooden mallets driving home the treenails in the planking of a dozen hulls. … At the end of every street there were white sails, and ships were going by like high summer clouds.”

Try the Maine Tourist Office (207-289-2423) and the Bath Area Chamber of Commerce (45 Front Street, Bath, ME 04530/Tel: 207-443-9751) for information on seasonal events and local bed and breakfasts. I stayed at The Inn at Bath, which was furnished with antiques and offered a lovely river view. The Maine Maritime Museum (207-443-1316) is open year-round, and its boat tours run if the weather is decent (June through September primarily). Popham Beach and Reid State Park are within a few miles of Bath, while Freeport, the home of L. L. Bean, is only a short drive to the southwest (and is open twenty-four hours a day). Bath is a good place to head right after Labor Day, when the crowds are gone and the climate is likely to be gentle.

The sturdy, foursquare piece of furniture on the opposite page is a kast , and if it is evocative of seventeenth-century Holland, that is an important part of its job. In fact, it was made here, most likely in the rural outpost of Kings County, New York (more familiarly known as the borough of Brooklyn), between 1710 and 1740. Although completed long after 1664, the year New Netherland was handed over to the British, it is a provincial interpretation of classic Dutch models, and its owners would have seen it as an emblem of their heritage, a bulwark against the encroachment of English culture.

I am sorry to see American Heritage (of all magazines) repeat as fact the myth that President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Charles A. Lindbergh “a new cabinet post as Secretary of Air” in 1940 (“The Time Machine,” April).

I am aware that Lindbergh’s diary reports a conversation (in September 1939) with his friend Col. Truman Smith, who, as military attaché in our Berlin embassy, had been responsible for Lindbergh’s three visits to Nazi Germany. According to Lindbergh, Smith told him that if he refrained from opposing American entry into the European war, “a Secretaryship for the Air would be created in the Cabinet and given to me!”

H. T. Webster was not a great artist. Once he had established a style, it hardly changed in more than forty years of drawing. Indeed, in mid-career he lost the use of his right hand due to acute arthritis, but in a few months he was drawing with his left, and his later work is quite indistinguishable from his earlier. Moreover, Webster’s style was highly reminiscent of Clare Briggs, the cartoonist a generation older who invented the comic strip.

But if only an adequate artist, Webster was a very great cartoonist, for he had the gift of finding the universal in the particular. Day after day he would draw a few spare lines, add a swash or two of black, a dozen words or so, and millions of middle-class newspaper readers would recognize themselves, their neighbors, their children in the act of being human, and laugh.

by H. Barbara Weinberg; Abbeville Press; 295 pages; $95.00.

I thoroughly enjoyed your piece in the May/June issue of American Heritage magazine on these marvelous old New York City homes (“Williamsburg on the Subway”).

I just thought it might be helpful to note that the Gracie Mansion Conservancy is not a recent phenomenon; rather, it was established in 1981 by Joan Kaplan Davidson when she was asked by Mayor Koch to come up with a proposal for renovating the mayor’s house. As the mayor’s chief of staff at that time I worked hand in hand with Joan Davidson from 1981 on. We raised $4.5 million in private funds and undertook a thorough renovation of the house in 1984 and repainted it in the colors depicted in the article.