January 2011

The public school problem

“Our nation is at risk,” the National Commission on Education reported in 1983. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war… .” And here is Robert Coram of Delaware, on the same subject in 1791: Schools are “completely despicable, wretched, and contemptible”; the teachers, “shamefully deficient.” In the years between, the public perception of our schools has swung from approval to dismay and then back again. Carl F. Kaestle, an eminent historian, traces the course of all the cycles of school reform in this country and discovers that neither conservative nor liberal movements ever fully achieve their aims—which may be just as well.

“I had prayed to God that this thing was fiction…”

It is a commonplace that the American Revolution determined the political destiny of the country. Far less noted is the fact that the revolution’s consequences, profound as they were, had little, if any, impact on the daily existence of most Americans. The social structures and economic realities that had determined the everyday lives of the British subjects living in the colonies continued to determine the existence of the American citizens of the new republic. Many still spent their whole lives within a few miles of where they had been born, and those who left home rarely returned. Most made their living by agriculture or commerce, and nearly all lived much as their parents and grandparents had lived before them.

I was commissioned from infantry officers candidate school in 1960 and for years heard the statistics of how few infantrymen actually ever fired their weapons in combat.

In the fall of 1966 I was a company commander in the 2d Battalion, 1st Infantry, then involved in Operation Attleboro. The operation turned out to be a much publicized one for a variety of reasons. Slam came to the division headquarters and interviewed several people. Not one of the four company commanders from the battalion was interviewed, and I’m not sure anyone from the unit was, in spite of the fact that we were the original organization to begin the operation and were involved in the major battle of the operation. The result of Slam’s efforts eventually was a book entitled Ambush , which is full of gross inaccuracies.

I would like to thank your author for his work in exposing this fellow.

Should the Smithsonian Institution ever wish to display an example of a prototypical Italian-American restaurant, it could do no better than to move Mario’s, lock, stock, and baròlo, from the Bronx to Washington, D.C.

For one thing, Mario’s has an impeccable provenance. It has been serving up Italian food from its site on Arthur Avenue since just after World War I. For another, it looks right. In every detail—the thickly varnished mural of Mount Vesuvius (done by an uncle sixty years ago), the diminutive reproductions of Michelangelo’s David, the photos of the Migliucci grandchildren over the entrance, the mustachioed, tuxedoed waiters serving mussels, pasta, sausage, crisp-shelled cannoli, and ink-black espresso with lemon rind and a shot of anisette—Mario’s evokes every American’s image of what an Italian-American restaurant should look, taste, and smell like.

I was both amused and happy to see the hue and cry over your use of the word Frisco to describe that grand Western metropolis (“Correspondence,” September/October). But I take exception to the statement that no one west of the Mississippi calls it Frisco. In all fairness we might attribute such ignorance to the fact that the now-merged St. Louis-San Francisco Railway (which was intended to run from St. Louis to San Francisco) used the logo Frisco, not to mention Rita Hayworth’s singing the unforgettable “Put the Blame on Mame,” whose heroine’s shimmy and shake caused the “Frisco quake,” or the less memorable “I Left Frisco Kate Swinging on the Golden Gate.”

Bernard A. Weisberger’s column in the July/August issue (“In the News”) is certainly timely. The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) has just fired another salvo in the trade war that is brewing over the European Community’s refusal to permit imports of American beef from animals treated with growth hormones.

For almost twenty years U.S. military commissaries in Europe have purchased beef from European suppliers to sell to American GIs and their dependents—some forty-eight million pounds a year, valued at up to sixty million dollars. The HASC wants the commissaries to substitute American beef for the European. The plan calls for the U.S. taxpayers to provide ten million dollars to defray the expense of shipping the American beef to Europe. The shipping time is expected to decrease the shelf life from forty-five to twenty days and require the purchase of additional refrigeration units to ensure a current supply.

After a full century in print, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court remains one of the queerer and more disturbing exercises of the American literary imagination, a brilliant comic fantasy that turns savage and shakes itself to pieces.

A note to tell you how thoroughly I (and the entire staff of the Morgan Library) enjoyed John Steele Gordon’s article “The Magnitude of J. P. Morgan” in the July/August issue.

Gordon did a superb job of evoking the man, his time, and his place in time. What was particularly gratifying (and rare) was Gordon’s way of steering a steady course between the popular notion of Morgan the ruthless robber baron and Morgan as some sort of gruff Santa Claus figure.

I was wondering if Mr. Gordon in his research ever found out why J. P. Morgan did not join the Union Army during the Civil War. Morgan was in his mid-twenties, an ideal time to volunteer or be drafted. I would guess he paid some German or Irish immigrant to go in his place. Edmund Morris, in his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, tells how Roosevelt’s father, “an ardent Union man,” hired a substitute during the Civil War. Shelby Foote, in his three-volume book The Civil War: A Narrative , describes how the classes at Harvard and Yale over the four-year period were little disturbed by the need for manpower. I guess the cliché used at the time that it was “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight” was quite true.