January 2011

William Henry Vanderbilt (1821–85), president of the New York Central and numerous other railroads, was a quiet, honest, modest, and, above all else, moderate man. Although the most important railroader of his time, he would be almost wholly forgotten today were it not for four simple words he so uncharacteristically and incautiously uttered on October 8, 1882: “The public be damned.”

Within 24 hours of its escaping his lips, the phrase had become one of the great public relations disasters in American business history and appeared on the front page of hundreds of newspapers. It provoked editorials, sermons, cartoons, and political speeches by the thousands. Within two days the New York Herald was able confidently to predict that “after he dies posterity will regard it as his epitaph, regardless of what may be carved on his tombstone.” The Herald was right. William Henry Vanderbilt, who had not the slightest ambition to literary fame, is listed in Bartlett’s Quotations.

The information presented in your March issue can hardly fail to damage S. L. A. Marshall’s reputation. I feel that despite the editors’ obvious wish to be considerate, the article made far too much of the lapses that have come to light, unless there is more damning evidence elsewhere.

When I first read of Marshall’s assertion that less than 25 percent of the American infantry soldiers in World War II fired their weapons in combat, I wondered if my experience was somehow unique. I was a replacement officer, fresh out of Infantry Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, sent to fill a personnel gap created by the Battle of the Bulge. In the words of the regimental adjutant who made my assignment to a front-line unit, I went to a “fine fighting outfit that had lost three company commanders in five days”—all killed. As a rifle-platoon leader in Company E, 333d Infantry, 84th Division, I was put with men who were probably typical of those who served in the nation’s armed forces in World War II. Those men had weapons, knew how to use them, and were ready to fire at any target that might appear before them.

For anyone who has experienced ground combat, there is no great secret about a rifleman’s not firing his weapon very much in a battle. Even a lead scout seldom sees the enemy ! This is why a rifle platoon or company uses scouts: to find the enemy, or at least the enemy position, and to draw enemy fire. And it is not a job that attracts a great many volunteers.

Further, it is sometimes the case that men on the line do not have ammunition to waste. It certainly was true for me and my combat infantry regiment in World War II. When we went on the line north of Strasbourg on Christmas Eve, 1944, there was no ammunition for me or others carrying carbines. That’s right—no ammunition! I went on the line with an empty weapon. Our riflemen borrowed from the outfit we were relieving. “Hey, buddy, leave me a clip, will ya?”

Ammo belts supplied to our machine gunners were rationed. They were not going to spray their ammo at emptiness.

Rudyard Kipling is so firmly associated in literary memory with the semitropical countries of the British Empire that it comes as something of a surprise to find that he spent more than four years in America. In a book recounting his stay, From Sea to Sea , Kipling described Seattle as “the town that was burned out a few weeks ago. … In the heart of the business quarters there was a horrible black smudge, as though a Hand had come down and rubbed the place smooth.”

Homespun Songs of the C.S.A. Freedom Bound The Swing Era

by Bobby Norton; Bobby Horton, 5245 Beacon Drive, Birmingham, AL 35210 .

Bobby Horton does not use the conventional language of the historian—he explains, for instance, that despite its Yankee genesis the lugubrious ballad “All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight” became popular around Southern campfires and thus was “a true crossover hit”—and yet his tape of Confederate Army war songs is an impressive and affecting piece of historical reconstruction.

Civil War soldiers were often poorly trained, poorly led, poorly fed, and poorly armed, but no two armies ever went into the field equipped with better songs. It is hard to say which side had the musical edge—the North may have had the best lyrics (“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), but the South had the best tune (“Dixie”), and both sides sang it whenever they got the chance.

by Robert Weisbrot; W. W. Norton & Company; 319 pages .

It all started with lunch counters. “To our mind, lunch counter segregation was the greatest evil facing black people in the country and if we could eliminate it, we would be like gods,” the activist Julian Bond recalled of the student sit-ins of 1960. The civil rights movement soon grew from localized action against racist restaurants into a nationwide struggle the likes of which had not been seen since the Civil War. In telling the story Robert Weisbrot brilliantly examines the course of American race relations over the last thirty years, linking grassroots protest campaigns to national political trends.

I enjoyed Albert B. Stephenson’s article on the Model T Ford (July/August). I drove a Model T for years, and Stephenson’s fond review of the machine’s eccentricities reminded me of others.

In balmy weather the Model T was always ready to go places; her planetary transmission was limber and her “hot-shot” dry battery was strong. In fact she would often start right up “on compression” the instant her switch was turned on, provided she had a charge of gas in the cylinder and her spark lever was set on the fourth notch. I used to show her off this way down in the village; I’d pull up on the crank a few times to compression, set the spark on the third notch, turn on the switch—and leave her! Returning with some of my cronies, I would nonchalantly step up to Tin Lizzie and give her front tire a swift kick. This really shook Model T to her frame; the vibration jiggled the spark lever down to the fourth notch and sent the hot spark buzzing down to start her engine with a mighty roar!

Today, when a painting by a living American artist fetches seventeen million dollars at auction, as a picture by Jasper Johns did last year, or when hundreds of people stand in line to get into a museum, as they did for the retrospectives of Edward Hopper, Willem de Kooning, and Georgia O’Keeffe, it is almost impossible to imagine the hostility and suspicion long encountered by American artists. In the early years of this century, a painter of independent or nonconformist leanings was a pariah. Thomas Eakins once replied to a biographical query, “My honors are misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect. …” New York was more tolerant than Eakins’s Philadelphia, but even there the art world was controlled by conservatives who wrote off the homegrown talent as insignificant. Fewer than six commercial galleries sold or showed the work of living Americans, and only two were willing to gamble on anything out of the ordinary. John Sloan was not wrong when he concluded, “Artists, in a frontier society like ours, are like cockroaches in kitchens—not wanted, not encouraged but nevertheless they remain.”