The novelist and historian Thomas Fleming’s dad rose in the hard scramble of ward politics to become a big cog in Boss Frank Hague’s New Jersey political machine. But he paid a steep price for it. In an affecting essay, the author comes to terms with his father’s unquiet ghost.
Streamlining the toaster … Christmas on Georgia’s Jekyll Island … making the titans of Wall Street earn an honest dollar … and, because this Christmas we want our readers to have it all—the watch and the chain, the hair and the combs—more.
On August 8, 1885, the crowds that lined the route of Ulysses S. Grant’s funeral procession from New York’s City Hall to the vault at 122d Street and Riverside Drive numbered well over a million. “Broadway moved like a river into which many tributaries poured,” a spectator wrote. “There was one living mass choking the thoroughfare from where the dead lay in state to the grim gates at Riverside opened to receive him.”
I read with interest John Steele Gordon’s piece on Alexander Hamilton’s establishing the Bank of the United States in the July/August issue (“The Founding Wizard“). The Bank of the Manhattan Company, founded by Hamilton’s nemesis, Aaron Burr, is one of Chase’s predecessor institutions. It was their quarrel over Burr’s new bank that prompted the duel in which Hamilton was killed.
The Hamilton article in your July/August issue was well written and informative—one of your better efforts.
I was greatly impressed by the Hamilton piece. May I suggest that you send copies to Lech Walesa and Tadeusz Mazowiecki. It might give them some pointers on how to get the Polish economy started.
Editor’s note: We did.
I read with interest Roger J. Spiller’s interview with Paul Fussell in the November 1989 issue (“The Real War“). If Fussell’s book Wartime can move a person to become a conscientious objector, it is indeed a powerful portrait of war, and Dr. Spiller’s Command and General Staff College course on “Men in Battle” is similarly valuable in its belief that an understanding of “wartime” will make for a better leader. Real war isn’t learned in the classroom. Nor would anyone argue that it could ever be completely described in a book. But the efforts of these scholars have briefly lifted the veil that descends over the battlefield during peacetime. And that is a view that every leader must be prepared to see for himself.
I want you to know that Irene Rich’s daughters Frances (age eighty) and Jane (seventy-three) are thrilled and delighted to be almost the centerfold of your “swimsuit issue” (July/August).
“The Public Schools and the Public Mood” (February) was particularly informative and relevant to our efforts to restructure our public education system—from site-based management and shared decision making to being the first state in the nation to address the latchkey-child problem by establishing low-cost after-school programs in every elementary school.
While we are approaching educational reform with an eye toward the future, the article helps us gain a valuable historical perspective.