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January 2011
What should we tell our children about Vietnam? It was a just cause and a winnable war; it was lost by irresponsible news media and an irresolute government.
The author recommends the accounts of McClellan in Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword (Doubleday, 1963) and T. Harry Williams’s Lincoln and His Generals (Knopf, 1952). James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom , a new volume in The Oxford History of the United States , is a fine overall account of the Civil War.
Topical jokes follow hard upon national disasters and traditionally are first heard on the floors of stock exchanges. In one theory they are invented by convivial men with nothing else to do until 10:00 A.M. ; in another they are the harsh amusements of an unsentimental trade. What’s remarkable is that the jokes keep coming even when the stock exchange itself is the victim of the disaster. The most widely admired current specimen cites the difference between a yuppie and a pigeon (a pigeon can still leave a deposit on a BMW). The New York Times ran a series of stock market disaster jokes within two weeks of Black Monday, concluding its survey with a vintage example from the 1929 debacle that had a businessman telling his secretary to get his broker on the phone and the secretary saying, “Certainly, sir. Stock or pawn?”
I am on page 74 of your March issue (the photographs are wonderful) and have to stop and write this letter. My husband and I have subscribed for many years now. I have always had a fantasy that I could travel back in time—American Heritage is about as close as it gets. Your articles and pictures bring history to life. Suddenly Abe Lincoln was a real human being with warts and all, and the founders of the Constitution were humanized.
Well, I have to get back to the article about Benjamin Franklin and his predilection for rattlesnakes.
The player piano came of age in America ninety years ago, and it caused an almighty stir. Within four decades it appeared to be dead. The craze dwindled, and in 1932 not a single player was shipped from the factories. But although player pianos have been manufactured only desultorily since, the machine established itself so firmly during its brief lifetime that it is impossible to find someone today who doesn’t know what a player piano is, who doesn’t remember what fun they were. Rolls for the pianos have been manufactured continuously since the 1890s, and new ones are still being made. The Vestal Press has long had a successful book in print on how to restore player pianos, and an enterprising firm in Kansas is busy supplying spare parts for them. People still find them a great pleasure, repairing them, rebuilding them, adding more piano rolls to their libraries (the market in secondhand rolls is brisk).
There is an extensive literature on the player piano, and a good place to start seeking it out is the Vestal Press (P.O. Box 97, Vestal, NY 13850; 607-797-4872). Vestal not only offers a comprehensive line of books on the subject but sells piano rolls and related items and is the publisher of Harvey Roehl’s Player Piano Treasury and Q. David Bowers’s fine Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments .
In October 1941, Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright, journalist, politician, and wife of the magazine tycoon Henry Luce, had dinner with half a dozen army officers in their quarters on top of an ancient Spanish fort beside the harbor of Manila. The main topic of conversation was the threat of war with Japan. Everyone assumed that, if hostilities began, the Philippines would be target No. 1 of the Japanese war machine.
Colonel Charles A. Willoughby, who would go on to glory of sorts as one of Douglas MacArthur’s most devoted staff officers, drew a map of Luzon on the tablecloth and traced arrows at Lingayen Gulf and Polillo Bight pointing toward Manila. “The main attacks will probably come here,” he said.
“You’re not giving away military secrets?” Mrs. Luce asked.
Willoughby laughed. “No. Just quoting military gospel—according to Homer Lea.”
You might be interested in an additional fact regarding Elbern Coons’s article “Blizzard.” That same year, 1931, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows of Holly, Colorado, raised the money for a monument in memory of the five children and bus driver who had lost their lives. The monument was dedicated on October 7, 1931, and placed near the graves of the blizzard victims in the Holly Cemetery.