January 2011

… Was Woodrow Wilson a “man of superficial ideas but no real principles” whose “obsessions befouled human discourse,” or was he someone who “did his best to apply intelligence and a sense of history to politics, and found that the system couldn’t accommodate them”? Was Theodore Roosevelt a creature of “ego rather than thought or principle”? Is his Secretary of State John Hay “the best possible illustration of a lazy, modestly talented individual who rose to renown”? Was Thomas Jefferson’s career “close to being a disaster”? American Heritage recently asked historians, journalists, and politicians to choose the single most overrated figure in all American history, and the most underrated one. The answers are surprising, provocative, irritating, funny, and altogether fascinating.

… For twenty years Edward Luttwak has been writing about military history and affairs, and he has emerged as one of the nation’s most influential students of how future wars may be fought. To formulate his plans, he makes use of the past as a carpenter makes use of nails: history is not merely a discipline to him, but an indispensable tool. In an interview that is both amusing and unsettling, he makes the case that in the age of nuclear weaponry, those who do not know the past not only are doomed to repeat it, but may well be doomed, period.

… He lived alone in a small cabin on Waiden Pond, of course, but he was far from being a misanthropic hermit. Part of the nature he so assiduously and poetically studied was human nature. In an eloquent assessment of this appealing figure, Edward Hoagland shows how Thoreau “is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves.”

… In the Republic’s darkest hour he took command. In the black days after Bull Run he won West Virginia for the Union. He raised a magnificent army and led it forth to meet Robert E. Lee, an opponent he found “cautious and weak.” Why hasn’t history been kinder to Gen. George B. McClellan? Stephen W. Sears tells the peculiar story of a man it is almost impossible to underrate.

… the crisply luminous maritime world of the artist Fitz Hugh Lane … newly discovered photographs of a vanished Connecticut… and, in fitting tribute to our nation’s 212th birthday, more.

In the February 1988 “Correspondence” section, Sid Depner refers to Wallace Stegner’s article “Who Are the Westerners?” (December 1987). His reference to the incident at Anderson’s store on the Snake River in Idaho was of particular interest to our family.

In 1880 my grandfather Mark Hunt was a member of a forty-man “gang” of mechanics that helped build a complete terminal outfit for the Union Pacific.

A sentence in “Matters of Fact” for March 1988 reads: “By eighteen the average American child is said to have survived 350,000 hours of commercials.…” Since an eighteen-year-old has been alive for only 157,680 hours (24 x 365 x 18), any eighteen-year-olds who have been exposed to 350,000 hours of TV commercials must have been watching several TV sets simultaneously twenty-four hours a day every day since the day they were born.

In his otherwise excellent retrospective of the FDR Presidency ("Why the Candidates Still Use FDR as Their Measure,” February 1988), William E. Leuchtenburg errs on one critical point.

The use that FDR made of radio carried no sense of informality in those first few years. For Americans, including this subteen and his family, the radio was newly acquired and not taken for granted.

FDR’s voice was the pivotal emotional prop for Americans. Formal in his delivery—certainly not intimate until much later in his tenure in office—he assured America that however he sought to cure our economic distress, he would succeed. That voice left no room for argument, and it was this aspect of FDR that had a critically important part in leading the country. All of these years later, I still hear it!

In “Windows on Another Time” (March 1988), in a long caption under a photograph of Presidents Wilson and Harding going to Harding’s inauguration, you wonder what these two men had to say to each other and how odd it seems that both Presidents seemed joyless.

According to Gene Smith in his book When the Cheering Stopped , Harding had reason to look that way. In fact, Harding was horrified. President Wilson was crying and to such an extent that Harding was wondering if he should not reach over and wipe the man’s tears before the cameras got too close.

Although Wilson had good reason to weep with the defeat of his League of Nations, perhaps another reason was that this true scholar and former Princeton professor had to spend his last moments as President with the intellectually bankrupt Harding, who was talking to him about … elephants.

Roosevelt and de Gaulle: Allies in Conflict The Blizzard of ’88

Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.