January 2011

As always with historians of this period, Carl Sandburg and Bruce Catton may be read for both information and pleasure, although the latter was certainly more scrupulous with his research. The Prairie Years in Sandburg’s multivolume biography of Lincoln and “The Crowd at the Wigwam” and “Railsplitter” chapters in Catton’s The Coming Fury contain excellent accounts of the convention. Readers interested in more detail should consult William Baringer’s comprehensive Lincoln‘s Rise to Power . The best primary source is contained in Murat Halstead’s eyewitness account The Caucuses of 1860 .

—P.A.

The two most popular novels in 19th-century America were Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) and Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896). (In fact, Sheldon’s book remained the dominant 20th-century best-seller right up until Peyton Place overtook it in the late 1950s.) Although the first of these two books is set in ancient Palestine and the second takes place in the contemporary American Midwest, they are dominated by the same central character, Jesus. Wallace’s Judah Ben-Hur is a wealthy Jew. At first he intends to throw off the yoke of Roman domination by leading an insurrection, but when his mother and sister are healed of leprosy by Jesus, Ben Hur turns from the ways of war to the Christian promise of peace and love. The actions of Sheldon’s characters spring from a scene early in the novel in which a Midwestern minister, Henry Maxwell, pledges that before he makes any decision or takes any action, he will ask himself: “What would Jesus do?” Just as Ben Hur’s life is transformed by Jesus’ message of love, so too is the life of Maxwell’s city.

In his review of Shelby Foote’s volumes on the Civil War (“Matters of Fact,” December 1987), Geoffrey Ward directed the back of his hand to those academic historians who do not appreciate writers such as Foote. Letters in the March 1988 issue suggest that tenured “historiographers” are envious of those who write well and in order to protect their turf do not accept gifted writers as real historians. I suggest that there is no such conflict. In more than twenty years of close contact with tenured historians, I have yet to hear such protectionist comments. This is a non-issue.

I was entranced by the article in the April issue on fast food. The beginnings of the phenomenon were seen by all of us, but only a few realized just what was happening.

I grew up in Rock Island, Illinois, and “soft” ice cream was a part of my youth. There were little ice-cream stores dotting the Tri Cities of Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport (across the Mississippi, in Iowa). In the thirties and early forties it was a very cheap date to walk a young lady up to the stand at Sixth and Seventeenth streets in Rock Island and spend a nickel on each of us for a soft cone of vanilla (that was all you could get) and stroll back down the street licking at a great rate so it did not melt all over in the midsummer heat. Maybe it is nostalgia, but 1 seem to recall the cones were huge, and I have not had as good a taste sensation in fifty years. I guess the young lady had something to do with it.

Olivier Bernier’s well-written piece on the 1958 Cadillac (“American Made,” May/June) neatly captures the spirit of the industry at that time—as well as the way the Cadillac embodied that spirit.

I think it’s interesting that even with all the improvements we’ve made in today’s automobiles, styling and “personality” are still very high priorities for our customers. Today, as in 1958, it seems that you are what you drive.

I really enjoyed the article.

He was the natural successor to John Singer Sargent, but Irving R. Wiles was born just a little too late to be celebrated by posterity, and today his name is all but forgotten.

Not only was Wiles one of America’s most successful and admired portrait painters during the first quarter of this century, he was one of the best. His patrons included financiers, statesmen, society hostesses, art collectors, popular actresses, and a President of the United States. Influential critics ranked him among the best portrait painters on either side of the Atlantic, his work surpassed only by that of the famous Sargent.

Irresistibly readable though it is, I doubt that Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers has leaped onto the bestseller list simply because people want to follow the roller-coaster histories of the Hapsburgs or the British Empire or other by-gone centers of world power. The book packs its wallop because Kennedy asks aloud a question that has been silently nagging at America’s consciousness: Is America falling behind?

Of course, there has never been a shortage of American hand wringers and Jeremiahs. But Kennedy wags no moral fingers and displays not the smallest hint of any anti-American bias. Neither does his book predict any kind of inevitable doom for the United States.

European observers at the end of the eighteenth century and for many years afterward were appalled by our uncouth manners, filthy towns, and gross tastes. One French aristocrat, a distinguished volunteer in Washington’s army, let such matters distort even his view of us as fighting men when he noted that “Americans have been used to idleness, to drinking tea and rum, to smoking etc.; they will not hold out in such a war....” How we started out as a rough and relatively undisciplined people is the subject of Jack Larkin’s richly detailed survey of our early manners and customs, “The Secret Life of a Developing Country,” in this issue.

Of course, one man’s brutishness is another’s vitality. Every group has its own definition of what constitutes good behavior, and as part of the national myth, we pay lip service to the right to be different. In actuality, any departure from one’s own norm is seen as either absurd or threatening. No wonder that every generation is convinced there has been a deplorable breakdown of manners.

West Point No Conflict Good Old Fast Food The ’58 Cadillac Private Trolley Parade Flank March

The dinner party is the ultimate celebration of what it means to be civilized,” my father used to say. “There is nothing better in this world than to settle down around a lovely table and eat good food and say interesting things with one’s friends. ”

When I was growing up, or thought I was, in Buffalo before World War II, Saturday-night dinner parties were an essential element in my parents’ lives. They spent a lot of time talking about them, going to them, and giving them. Time and again, my sister and brother and I would come home from sledding in Delaware Park to find an extra maid clucking in the kitchen, polishing the silver, teetering on a stepladder to get at the good china, while the cook distractedly set out soup and sandwiches for us on the kitchen table before she returned to basting the great, sizzling roast of beef in the oven or shelling the fresh green peas.