January 2011

One day in the 1880s, Arthur T. Hadley, the distinguished American economist who would later be president of Yale University, was visiting his lawyer’s office on Broad Street near the New York Stock Exchange. “Well, what do you think of that?” said Hadley, looking out the window at the busy scene below. “There’s Jay Gould standing across the street, and, for once, he has his hands in his own pockets.”

Poor Jay Gould. During his life, he suffered from a terrible public image. Professor Hadley, an astute and not unkindly man, was merely reflecting the prevailing opinion of the day. Newspapers routinely referred to Gould as the “Mephistopheles of Wall Street.” Cartoonists depicted him as a pirate, a Shylock, a hangman, and worse. Joseph Pulitzer, who knew Gould personally and pursued wealth quite as vigorously, described him as “one of the most sinister figures that has ever flitted bat-like across the vision of the American people.”

One balmy summer morning this year, the headlines sang a song of scandal. GINGRICH’S PAY TO AIDES IN 2 RACES RAISES QUESTION OF RULE-BREAKING, said one. That’s the Republican whip of the House of Representatives they were talking about. He may have used federal money to pay his campaign workers; he may have taken improper contributions.

Predictably, and not entirely without cause, Gingrich will complain that he is the victim of partisan vengeance. He himself, last year, sparked an investigation of charges that the then Speaker of the House, Jim Wright—a Texas Democrat—garnered illegal contributions disguised as royalties on a published collection of his speeches.

It is a December evening in Newport, Rhode Island, a town better known for its summer charms. On Pelham Street the gas lamps have just lit up, their stanchions twined with holly and red ribbons. White lights stand in the windows of square, solemn houses of pre-Revolutionary merchants, and front doors are bright with fruit-bearing wreaths. In this violet-hued, crystal-cold dusk the only footsteps you hear will be your own. Very likely no car will pass.

I am sure that there are many people who are in the same happy position in which I find myself: to wit, being the possessor of every issue of American Heritage since it was first published.

I celebrated my eightieth birthday last May, but that has not dimmed my pleasure every time the mailman delivers the next issue. Keep up the good work.

Amelia Earhart Packard Great American Lighthouses

by Doris Rich; Smithsonian Institution Press; 309 pages.

Amelia Earhart was one of the leading aviators in the country when her plane went down over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. She was also one of the most famous women in the world, and Doris Rich explores the costs of that fame in this new biography of the woman known as Lady Lindy.

As a young woman, Earhart clipped newspaper articles about the professional achievements of career women. But after dropping out of college to nurse Canadian soldiers wounded in World War I, she traveled around the United States without a clear ambition of her own. All that changed on Christmas Day, 1920, when she attended an air show in Long Beach, California. Her first flying lesson (less than two weeks after the show) convinced her that “life was incomplete unless I owned my own plane.” She rose to fame as the first woman to fly the Atlantic, as a passenger in 1928 and as a solo pilot in 1932.

by J. M. Fenster, photographs by Roy D. Query; Automobile Quarterly Publications; 208 pages.

“Emil Fikar was not exactly a gangster,” J. M. Fenster begins her essay on the 1929 Packard Speedster 626 Runabout, “but he did live in Chicago in the Twenties. And he did sell a prohibited beverage.” What Fikar sold was near beer, that dispiriting concoction whose other name, 3.2 beer, reflects its meager alcohol content. But near beer was just as illegal as whiskey during Prohibition, and Fikar “did require a car that would outrun anything a sheriff might drive.” To this end Fikar went to Buresch Motor Sales on Ogden Avenue one day in 1928 and asked about the new 626 Speedster, the one Packard’s publicity people were offering to “the select few who frankly love the hum of racing car power throbbing to be unleashed at a toe-touch.”

by F. Ross Holland, Jr. ; The Preservation Press; 346 pages.

There is no such thing as an ugly lighthouse. One of the editors here saw his first—the “Little Red Lighthouse” under the George Washington Bridge in New York City—at the age of six, returning from an afternoon of grandmothers and holiday turkey. It was a particularly beautiful day, one of those fall afternoons when the sun falling over New Jersey turns the Hudson River into a shimmering golden plate, and since then he has never been able to pass a lighthouse without stopping to admire it.