January 2011

Because it is surrounded by ample acreage in the large city park that bears its name, the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt House appears much as it would have two centuries ago, when it was the rural manor house of a large working plantation. Its back windows, in fact, look out on broad open fields ringed by seemingly timeless woodlands.

In 1905, on a visit to Richmond, the noted man of letters Henry James was struck by the sight of the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee high atop its pedestal overlooking Monument Avenue. There was about it, James thought, “a strange eloquence … a kind of melancholy nobleness.” Something in the figure suggested “a quite sublime effort to ignore, to sit, as it were, superior and indifferent … so that the vast association of the futile for the moment drops away from it.” Several decades later Lee’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman passed the Lee statue in Richmond daily and invariably saluted it. “I shall not fail to do that as long as I live,” Freeman said. Lee has that effect on people. For almost a century and a third, Americans, Northerners and Southerners, have been trying to get right with Robert E. Lee.

I had not meant to write a novel about Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. I had meant to write about an exiled Southerner living in New York City in love with a much younger and extremely mobile dancer. That Southerner would be writing a novel. His frustration at not being able to catch up with his dancer was such that he would begin to think about the Civil War. Perhaps something about his relationship with the dancer would remind him of Lee’s relationship with Jackson, the Lee who at the start of the second year of the war was little more than Jefferson Davis’s glorified press secretary and the Jackson who was dancing circles around three Union armies in the Shenandoah Valley.

Everybody hates poor old New York now. Actually, I suppose everybody has always hated New York City, but it’s during times of civic calamity that the feelings really reveal themselves. It’s certainly happening at the moment. And it’s happening in the same terms that it has since the beginning of this town: gloating, under a thin sheen of dismay and concern. The real message comes through clearly enough: “All right, you’ve had the eighties; you’ve eaten your plate of two-hundred-dollar pasta, and now it’s gone and by God, you’re going to pay for it.”

The Kite , a 280-ton sealer, set sail on June 6 from New York carrying the six men and one woman who made up Lt. Robert Peary’s North Greenland Expedition. Josephine Peary, the lieutenant’s wife and fellow explorer, became the first white woman to join a polar expedition and at one point stymied a plot by one of the scientists to turn back after the ship’s iron tiller shattered her husband’s leg. The Kite landed at Whale Sound on Greenland’s western coast in late July; the group built a house and dug in for the six-month night that would begin in October.

The cover of the May 20 Saturday Evening Post bore a painting of a little boy shamefacedly pushing a baby carriage past his hooting friends. The illustration was the first Post cover to bear the signature of Norman Rockwell, a twenty-two-year-old who had previously illustrated scenes of juvenile heroism for Boys’ Life . Two weeks later the June 3 Post displayed on its front a boy ringmaster in a baggy suit presenting an undersize strong man to a crowd. The magazine had inaugurated what would become a long parade of Rockwell’s folksy scenes, some 320 covers between 1916 and 1963. “I learned to draw everything except glamorous women,” explained Rockwell. “Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I’ve always called myself an illustrator. I’m not sure what the difference is.”

By the time Citizen Kane finally made its debut on May 1, 1941, Radio City Music Hall had refused to show the picture and the Palace Theater had taken on the premiere instead. Orson Welles had spent the six weeks since his film had originally been scheduled to open directing a Broadway adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son . The controversial play, telling the story of a black man accused of murdering a white woman in Chicago, was well received. It made an ideal distraction for the young director as he waited for the difficulties surrounding Citizen Kan’s release to be resolved.

On June 13, by a 5 to 4 majority, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Miranda v. State of Arizona that “the individual is accorded his privilege under the Fifth Amendment” against self-incrimination and that confessions obtained under “custodial interrogation” were invalid if not preceded by a legal warning of the defendant’s rights. “He has a right to remain silent,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the majority, in language that would soon be echoed by Miranda warnings used nationwide; ”… any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and … he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed.”

The decision ended decades of reliance on a vague “voluntariness” test and warned against incommunicado detention and other ways of coercing confessions. Miranda could not guarantee fair play, but it became a minimum standard for police procedure.