January 2011

Stanny The Voice of the City

by Paul R. Baker; The Free Press; 483 pages.

Paul Baker opens his authoritative biography of Stanford White by thrusting a heavy mantle upon him: “More than anyone else at the turn of the century, he was tastemaker for his age.” This is not an exaggeration. As Baker goes on to show, White’s sensibilities were central to the artistic and architectural design of Gilded Age America.

by Robert W. Snyder; Oxford University Press; 220 pages.

By 1880 a new kind of entertainment called vaudeville had emerged in New York City. It drew upon talent from concert saloons, minstrel shows, circuses, dime museums, and German beer gardens. The songs, dances, skits, and novelty acts that made up a typical program brought New Yorkers of all classes and backgrounds together into palatial theatrical arenas. In this manner, Robert W. Snyder argues, American popular culture was born: “Vaudeville took people out of their neighborhoods and moved them into a world of stars and fans … foreshadowing the day when people would relate to television and movie stars as if they were intimate friends.”

Robert Bendiner’s article “What I Learned from the Pirates” (September/October) warmed the heart of this long-suffering Pittsburgh fan.

As a veteran of many lengthy afternoons at Forbes Field and, more recently, evenings at Three Rivers Stadium, I share some of his memories of the ups and downs of our distinguished team.

I sense as well his identification with my frequent longing for the days of real grass … 154-game schedules … eight teams per league … and, yes, no city west of St. Louis with a major-league team!

Thanks for a gracious evocation of the good old days.

Thank God for John Steele Gordon’s article “The Problem of Money and Time” in the May/June issue. Our in-laws’ diatribe about how “You, the younger ones, spend so much money, and how it is that you do not appreciate how we spent so much less on our childhood pleasures or needs” has temporarily ceased. I imagine many of our peers who read American Heritage ran off copies of that article, as we did, and sent them off to such elders.

I always thought we weren’t doing so badly, and now I better appreciate that we’re doing just fine.

Your story in “The Time Machine” (September/October) about the defeat of General Hood at Atlanta by General Sherman brought forth a flood of memories for me.

My maternal grandmother, Olivia Bowers Beeson, was born on the Hood plantation, as it was known locally, in Washington County, Texas, in 1871, the daughter of James and Clarissa Hood Bowers. She was, and remained all her seventy-nine years, a Texan and an unreconstructed Confederate Southerner. Grandmother was a wonderful teller of tales and held very strong opinions about certain things.

I have been very bothered by the campaign to “redeem the honor” of the World War II GI at the expense of SLA Marshall, especially as few of those writing in your letters column have read his works.

Marshall was attempting to deal with the fact the U.S. infantry doctrine at the squad/platoon level was flawed, badly flawed. While American air power, artillery, and armor were respected by the Germans, American infantry was not. Looking at reports of actions in Europe, in straight-up infantry vs. infantry actions, the U.S. Army did very poorly without its supporting arms.

I find it interesting that when Men Against Fire was published in 1947, those officers of the U.S. Army with direct combat experience were quite willing to accept his premise. If his findings were as badly flawed as is claimed, it strikes me that the debate on him would have been then and not now. I feel that the problems are not so much with the findings of Marshall as with those veterans who forty years later are unwilling to face the truth.

During the year that has passed since the editors assembled the last “Winter Art Show,” they have once again come across scores of appealing paintings that for one reason or another didn’t make it into the magazine. The scope of the material continues to surprise and delight us. So, too, do some of the sources. We met the gravely appealing child on the opposite page, for instance, on our senior editor Frederick Alien’s wedding day; the boy is his great-great-uncle, and the painting was hanging on the wall of his parents’ apartment. As always, the pictures on the pages that follow remind us of what eloquent historical documents paintings can be, whether they are detailing the fixtures of daily life 130 years ago, as Reissner’s sharp-edged and exhilarating winter landscape does, or conveying the feel of another time more subtly. The very way the light falls against the wall of the tall Central Park West living room at John Koch’s cocktail party tells us something of the level of civilized life in Manhattan thirty years ago.

In June 1986 I was a foreign observer at the Eighth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow. I had visited the Soviet Union several times before, mostly to lecture on behalf of the U.S. State Department, and when the invitation came, I was of two minds about accepting it. My experience of Soviet functions had ranged from boring to terminally depressing: officials making self-congratulatory speeches, “voting” unanimously to elect hand-picked candidates, and a general feeling for the foreigner of being watched all the time. What persuaded me to go was that I was turning over in my mind the possibility of writing what turned out to be my novel Chernobyl, and it seemed a good chance to do some preliminary research.