January 2011

In the “Then and Now” feature in the May/June issue, you show photographs of Pennsylvania Avenue in 1904 and today. The caption under the “Today” photo states that “every inaugural parade since Jefferson’s has followed this route to the Capitol.” Every parade I have witnessed followed this route from the Capitol. The parade forms at the Capitol and marches down Pennsylvania Avenue and past the White House. The parade turns right at the corner shown in the photo to jog around the Treasury building on its way to the White House.

In October of 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had recently intervened in a national coal strike and the Russo-Japanese War, turned his formidable attention to another kind of struggle. The president, a gridiron enthusiast who avidly followed the fortunes of his alma mater, Harvard, summoned representatives of the Eastern football establishment—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—to the White House. He wanted to discuss brutality and the lack of sportsmanship in college play.

Theodore Roosevelt believed strongly that football built character, and he believed just as strongly that roughness was a necessary—even a desirable—feature of the game. “I have no sympathy whatever,” he declared, “with the over-wrought sentimentality that would keep a young man in cotton wool. I have a hearty contempt for him if he counts a broken-arm or collarbone as of serious consequences when balanced against the chance of showing that he possesses hardihood, physical prowess, and courage.”

The streetcar pictured on page 111 of your April issue is no ordinary trolley. It appears to be the open or summer party car Pacific built around 1897 for the Cincinnati Street Railway. It is a very rare style of car made for private excursions. The trips were bound by the system’s trackage, but in some cases it was possible to go out into the countryside via connecting trackage with suburban railways.

On a crisp November day four years after the end of the Civil War, two squads clashed on a field in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The young men, from Princeton and Rutgers, were struggling over an inflated rubber ball rather than titanic national issues, but what has been called the first intercollegiate football match was played out in the shadow of the greater conflict. Princetonians cheered their boys to defeat with a “booming rocket call, hissing and bursting,” adapted from a Union cheer, and their strongest player was a hulking Kentucky veteran known as “Colonel Weir.” And when one of the participants came to describe the game, he used a wholly military vocabulary: “It was difficult to distinguish between friend and foe in the ever-shifting change of players on the field of battle.”

How does one describe a small town? And how does one explain a town when it sets out to catch all its sinners? All I can do is tell you a little of the history of my hometown, Hinton, Summers County, West Virginia, as I remember it.

It always touches my heart when I come in sight of Hinton, regardless of which direction I come from. I’ve been from Virginia to California and from Texas to Canada, and no scenery makes my heart skip a beat, increases my pulse, or causes a warm, glowing feeling to flood my soul the way the overwhelming beauty of our valley does.

I joined the Navy because my dad and uncle were World War II Navy and I wanted an equivalent to my civilian job as a fire fighter. I requested shore duty in Vietnam because the only reason I was in the service was that I truly wanted to be involved, to find out just why we were involved in a conflict halfway around the world. I was lucky to come home with no mental or physical scars. As senior enlisted man in charge of salvage and fire protection from Saigon to Vung Tau on the Saigon River, I had the opportunity to see a considerable amount of the southern section of Vietnam. I managed to go on helo strike missions, PBR patrols, MED-CAPs, an Army search-and-destroy patrol, and an artillery barrage. I fought more fires in a fifteen-month period, including ammo dumps, fuel farms, oil tankers, and a whole village, than I have in the past twenty years as a fire fighter.

I suggest we tell our children that the United States ignored the lessons of history by getting involved in Vietnam.

Tell them that Congress shamefully approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was based on a manufactured incident of little consequence, and which was used by LBJ to broaden the war without actually declaring war.

Tell them of Presidents who talked of peace while planning for war.

Tell them of the lies and deceit of those in power.

Tell them of the indiscriminate bombing and the use of the poisonous herbicide Agent Orange on a small country, of the numerous civilian casualties and millions of refugees caused by our actions.

Tell them of the unfairness of the military draft, and the shameful treatment of the Vietnam veterans. Their reward for doing their duty was to be poisoned by Agent Orange, vilified by the people, unable to get decent jobs, victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, even driven to suicide.

General George B. McClellan possessed a particular talent for dramatic gesture, and on the afternoon of September 14, 1862, at South Mountain in western Maryland, he surpassed himself. Before him on the smoke-wreathed mountaintop, his army was locked in combat with the Confederate enemy. Nearby artillery batteries added their thunder to the roar of musketry, and columns of reinforcements in Federal blue could be seen winding their way up the mountainside. At stage center, posed against the spectacular backdrop of battle, General McClellan sat motionless on his great war horse with his arm extended, pointing his passing troops toward the fighting. They cheered him until they were hoarse, one of them recalled, and some broke ranks to swarm around the martial figure and indulge in the “most extravagant demonstrations.” All the scene lacked was a painter to celebrate the general in his moment of triumph.

Edward Hoagland recommends the 1985 Library of America edition of Thoreau’s works, which includes all four of his books. Dover Publications published The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau in two volumes. As for biographies, Walter Harding’s The Days of Henry David Thoreau (Princeton and Dover) and Robert D. Richardson, Jr.’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (California) are good.