January 2011

“I imagine that one has to be at least 90% damn fool to plunge headlong into every hopeless fight that calls for volunteers,” Harold L. Ickes wrote in 1930. One can see why he thought this at the time. The 56-year-old Ickes had lent formidable political energy to a succession of ill-fated progressive Republican candidates for the Chicago mayoralty as well as for the Presidency. Two years later an invitation to organize a league of Western Independent Republicans for Roosevelt revived his battered political spirits. Ickes would spend 13 years as Secretary of the Interior, 12 of them dutifully serving Franklin Roosevelt. T. H. Watkins’s Righteous Pilgrim masterfully dramatizes the long political life of this irascible New Dealer.

Ickes remade a cabinet department that had historically viewed the American landscape as a resource ripe for exploitation. Though not a radical preservationist, he placed more value on undisturbed wilderness than on profit-making opportunities.

Founding Financier Founding Financier Founding Financier Wartime Still in the Swim Hawaiian Schooling

Men and women achieve historical perspective by making analogies. The old tag that we “remember the future and invent the past” suggests the hazards of this procedure; it admonishes us not to forget that the lessons of history are all too likely to be a series of projected misunderstandings. Anyone seeking those lessons runs the danger of being capriciously selective, self-serving, and sentimental. It is also easy to see the future as nothing more than mindless repetitions of the past; a Superman comic of my boyhood featured jet cars that looked wonderfully like levitating, betail-finned Cadillacs of the time. In fact, the futures we “remember” are unlikely to resemble much the one we are actually stumbling toward. Still, analogy is all we have, and when we find ourselves in urgent national difficulties, historical analogies proliferate.

THE MUNICH ANALOGY

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS IMAGES FROM THE PAST.

Photographie Lineage

The history of any town, large or small, has the air of a surreal play, one on which the curtain never goes down. The cast changes constantly; the set does not—except that from time to time scene shifters steal in with fresh furnishings, backdrops, even entire buildings. The plot is improvised by the characters as they go along. It can be as somnolent as watching grass grow, or bursting with action. And such dramas, of course, never end.

I‘m sorry, son,” said the father to his young offspring in a New Yorker cartoon some years ago, “but we WASPs have no tribal wisdom to pass on.”

Nevertheless (and at the risk of stepping on a joke), no ethnic group capable of developing a social institution as durable, adaptable, and now universal as the country club could be wholly lacking in tribal wisdom.

Ken Burns is no stranger to me. We first met in 1983 at a party that the historian David McCullough gave at the Yale Club to wish a happy hundredth birthday to the Brooklyn Bridge. If David had not introduced Ken to me as the maker of an acclaimed film about the bridge, I would have mistaken him for a high school student—perhaps the older brother of the infant he was holding in his arms. It was actually his daughter Sarah, and Burns was then 30. Seven years later, the baby face is a little more seasoned, and there is another daughter, Lilly, and five more prize-winning historical documentaries—on the Shakers, the Statue of Liberty, Huey Long, Congress, and the artist Thomas Hart Benton.

Kudos to William Leuchtenburg for bringing to the fore the disheartening truth about Lyndon Johnson (“A Visit with LBJ,” May/June). Historians who are in the business of rating Presidents will undoubtedly have to weigh Leuchtenburg’s shocking and cogent piece in assessing Johnson’s tenure.

The article highlighted by your cover is much ado about nothing. Perhaps a couple of paragraphs could have handled the author’s surprise at hearing LBJ personally express his dreams and venom. The author’s astonishment tells me he had his head in the sand about what was going on at the time.

I enjoyed your Civil War issue (March), especially Peter Andrews’s article on George H. Thomas. Mr. Andrews is correct in observing that Pap Thomas has not been given his due by historians—even in his native state of Virginia. When he cast his lot with the Union in 1861, even his family disavowed him. According to legend his two sisters turned his portrait to the wall. “As far as we are concerned,” one later said, “our brother died in 1861.” Even after the war they refused to reply to his correspondence, and no members of his Virginia family attended his funeral in New York in 1870.

A vivid reminder of the bitter rift within the family is a beautiful sword with a silver scabbard and solid-gold pommel given Thomas for his services in the Mexican War. He wore it only once, to his wedding; then he left it with his sisters for safekeeping. He never saw it again. When he wrote his sisters after the war to request the sword, they refused to return it. In 1900 the family presented it to the Virginia Historical Society where today it is prized as one of the most valuable items in our museum collection.