January 2011

In her own country, the prestigious Journal des Débats pronounced her a national institution, maintaining that “to criticize her is like criticizing the tomb of Napoleon.” It was Oscar Wilde who, when she came to England in 1879, cast an armful of lilies at her feet and hailed her as the “Divine Sarah.”

Strong Feelings Bach and Brubeck American Prestige American Prestige Carnegie’s Daughter Western Stories Western Stories Western Stories Western Stories The Great Swap Nothing Improper More on Marshall

It is springtime in post-World War I Paris, the final day of the rugby tournament at the VIII Olympiad, to be exact, and fifty thousand Frenchmen are filing into Colombes Stadium to watch the mighty French national rugby team win the first gold medal of the 1924 Olympics. Their opponents? A ragtag band of California college kids calling themselves the USA Olympic rugby team. Barely two hours later the novice American rugby team has pulled off what the United Press sports editor Henry L. Farrell was to call “the brightest entry that has been scored on all the pages of American international sports records.” But U.S. supporters lie beaten unconscious on the sidelines, and the Yankee players have to be rescued from a rioting crowd by dozens of armed police. And rugby is never again played as an Olympic sport.

As I read your March article “The South’s Inner Civil War,” I felt as if I were still hearing stories told to me by my family. When one is reared with living history stories, it is surprising to discover that they are now well known.

My family is from Carter County in the upper east corner of Tennessee. My great-grandmother Evie Custer Perry told about the bitter division in her family during the Civil War. Her mother’s family was very strongly pro-Union, but her father, Calvin Custer, was a doctor in the Confederate army. When he returned to Carter County after the war, his wife’s family refused to allow him to remain. My great-grandmother said that the last thing that she could remember about her father was seeing him as he rode over a hill on his horse, leaving for St. Louis.

Benjamin McArthur’s “The War of the Great Books” (February) illuminates the way the long-standing opposition of the ancients and the moderns (or of their partisans) reveals more about the combatants than about the merits.

Listeners who love Bach today can learn the different delights of Brubeck and the Beatles tomorrow; admirers of Picasso can learn to see the joy of Rembrandt as well. Readers who look for quality wherever they find it, without asking whether it comes from the right side of the tracks, know that both the ancient and the modern writers are with us.

As one who has spent his entire adult life either overseas or working on foreign affairs, I subscribe heartily to John Lukacs’s thesis as presented in your March issue. Mr. Lukacs correctly points out in “America’s True Power” that our prestige overseas remains formidable even as our economic power (temporarily) wanes. My experience as American ambassador here confirms that the symbolism of the American experience is still a subject of fascination and respect. Both the English language and American studies attract steadily growing interest among university students and faculty in this former French colony, which professes Marxism as its prevailing ideology.

In return, I find it disturbing that a majority of Americans either cannot even find the Congo on a world map or confuse it with its neighbor across the river: Zaire, the former Belgian Congo.

Two cornerstones of the Johnson administration’s Great Society were set in place in July. On July 2 Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during a nationally televised ceremony. The law prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations, in employment or union membership, and in voter registration.

Though Johnson stated that the goal of the law was “to bring justice and hope to our people—and peace to our land,” the Black Muslim leader Malcolm X argued that “you can’t legislate good will.…by promising that which cannot be delivered.” The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., agreed with the President, predicting that the Civil Rights Act would “bring a cool and serene breeze to an already hot summer.” But racial riots later that month in several Eastern cities would demonstrate that the legislation would not solve all the problems that American minority groups faced.

When the Marquis de Lafayette was buried in Paris in 1834, the dirt that covered his casket came from Bun- ker Hill. Even in death the dashing nobleman and hero of the American Revolution looked to the United States. Lafayette was a hero of the French Revolution too, but it was America that fascinated him and American statesmen who shaped his ideals. When Lafayette arrived in America to volunteer to fight against the British, he was an impetuous boy of nineteen; when he left, he was a popular and successful military leader and one of the architects of Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown. Although the zenith of his fame here came after his triumphant return to America in 1824, his image and name have been forever stitched into the fabric of America.

Most of the best colonial minds of the eighteenth century—Benjamin Franklin the most dedicated of them—did what they could to forestall the American Revolution, urging compromise and conciliation with the Crown until all hope was lost. But once the Revolution came, they did not look back with regret. And once the separation from the mother country was accomplished (with the help of French arms, money, and blood), the question of its necessity never arose. Our Revolution was clearly a good thing—a matter of pride and daring that informs the aspirations and achievements of the American people. But the question of whether the French Revolution was good and necessary is one that still divides France as dramatically as the severance of Louis XVTs bewildered head from his torso. For the French, their Revolution remains “a very great event that took a bad turn.”