January 2011

The look of the heartland Battle of the books The man who would be black Plus . . .

During his headlong, troubled life, the photographer John Vachon recorded an equally restless America weathering depression and war. Although he was an eternal outsider, Vachon had an instinctive feel for every level of society, and his traveling salesmen and fight managers, cops and statesmen, all glow with the burnish of authenticity. In a touching essay, Thomas B. Morgan tells about the man who showed us so much about ourselves.

Recently there have been harsh confrontations on college campuses across the country about just exactly what makes up our proper heritage. Programs that study the great works of the Western tradition have come under attack as being myopic, limited, even racist. This new ferment is actually middle-aged now, and Benjamin McArthur takes us back to its first skirmishes over fifty years ago on the University of Chicago campus, where Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler gave birth to the Great Books movement.

On a sunny November day in 1959, a tall, brown-haired Texas writer entered a New Orleans house. Four days later a bald, unemployed black man emerged. Both men were John Howard Griffin, and he was setting out on a journey that no white man had ever made before. In a compelling profile, Ernest Sharpe, Jr., tells of the tortured, poetic man whose four-week sojourn as an itinerant black—which led to the immensely influential best seller Black like Me —changed many lives, including Griffin’s own.

Stamps like you’ve never seen ‘em before . . . birthday thoughts about George Washington by his greatest living biographer . . . what makes a Georgian house Georgian . . . and, because we’ve given so freely for so long that people have come to think it their due, more.

There appears to be no limit to our interest in the private lives of unhappy artists. As I write, a compelling bestseller details the swift rise and interminable disintegration of Truman Capote, and a cockeyed one makes more of Picasso’s misogyny than of his painting; two new books chronicle the sour, sad life of Dorothy Parker; and in another, friends and enemies bicker over every one of Ernest Hemingway’s battle scars.

Although our interest in drunks and neurotics and egomaniacs like these was at least initially piqued by their work, biographers customarily slight their art in the interest of their eccentricities. Complacent envy helps fuel our fascination with artistic gossip; just think, we smile as we turn the page, how much better we would have done if we’d been given such gifts. So does the secret hope that in the course of reading about the supremely talented we will somehow discover the trick that separates them from us.

In June 1984, I got an odd call from an editor at The Wall Street Journal. I had submitted an article that marked the 100th anniversary of the first publication of Charles Dow’s stock-market average. How do you know, the editor asked, that July 3, 1984, is the right date? What is your source?

I replied that my source was page 34 of Lloyd Wendt’s The Wall Street Journal, the definitive history of the newspaper, published in 1982. The editor asked me if I could send him a copy of page 34. I suggested that someone at the Journal ought to be able to verify the date. No, I was told, the Journal’s editorial offices could not easily locate a copy of the definitive history of the Journal.

By Lonnie Wheeler and John Baskin; Orange Frazer Press, Inc., Wilmington, Ohio; 271 pages.

Cincinnati does not have the most impressive winning tradition in baseball, but it may have the most eminent history. Ever since Harry Wright turned his Cincinnati Red Stockings into the first professional baseball team, in 1869, the city has regularly sprung on the major leagues such innovations as doubleheaders, night games, and Pete Rose. This energetic book combines a fan’s enthusiasm with a historian’s grand sweep to show how much baseball and Cincinnati have meant to each other.

I really enjoyed reading the article on fast food (April), especially the reference to my dad’s early days with the A&W root beer stand. It will be fun for me to share this issue of American Heritage with my mother. I know she will enjoy reminiscing about the good old times.

A letter in your September/October issue was illustrated with a photograph of a White Tower restaurant and the caption made mention of nickel hamburgers.

That wasn’t all! In 1932 my job (at $95 per month) with Container Corporation of America was within three blocks of a White Tower. When I wasn’t brown-bagging my lunch, I ate there—three hamburgers, a piece of apple pie, and a glass of milk—all at five cents each! Even a twenty-fivecent lunch seemed, at the time, like splurging.