Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
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January 2011
by Raoul Aglion; The Free Press; 239 pages.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle spent most of World War II furious with each other. Raoul Aglion, one of de Gaulle’s delegates to America during the early 1940s, was a witness to this diplomatic war within a war between a French general seeking political recognition and an American President determined to make his allies play by his rules. Aglion’s engaging book examines how public opinion, egos, and politics influenced Roosevelt’s resistance to and ultimate acceptance of de Gaulle.
by Mary Cable; Atheneum; 198 pages.
A true blizzard, in meteorological terms, is not just a lot of snow. It must combine heavy snowfall, bitter cold, and a fierce wind.
Such a storm was the Blizzard of 1888, which struck the eastern seaboard of the United States on March 12 after several days of springlike weather. By the end of the first day practically every overhead wire—telephone, telegraph, and electric—was down, and an Albany newspaper noted that “New York is as remote from us as Tokio.” The death toll on land was greater than three hundred, and more than a hundred seamen died as 198 ships sank, were damaged, or were driven ashore.
Reading Neil A. Grauer’s entertaining Fred Alien piece in the February 1988 issue, I was reminded of an evening years ago at Toots Shor’s fabulous saloon in New York. Fred was among half a dozen regulars at the bar whom Toots, of hallowed memory, invited upstairs to his quarters to watch what I believe was an early edition of the TV program then known as “The Toast of the Town.” It had as its host Ed Sullivan, the columnist and the butt later of so many imitators of his stiff, awkward introductions of guests. Allen, like many radio personalities of that time, was an avowed disparager of the upstart new medium called television and needed no excuse to wax vitriolic, given the opportunity. He watched the opening for just a short while, leaving only after pronouncing in his usual acerbic delivery a critique I’ll remember always. “That man,” he said of Sullivan, “has the personality of a cobblestone.”
If this Republic is to achieve the greatness and duration its founders hoped to secure for it; if it is to continue to spread abroad over the earth the principles of its constitutions or the equity of its laws and the hope it extends to the betterment of the human race, then it must realize that this can only be done by possessing an ability and potentiality to be supreme over those nations whose ambitions and expansion are convergent. To free a nation from error is to enlighten the individual, and only to the degree that the individual will be receptive of truth can a nation be free from that vanity which ends with national ruin. No state is ever destroyed except through those avertible conditions that mankind dreads to contemplate. Yet nations prefer to perish rather than to master the single lesson taught by the washing away of those that have gone before them. To speak of the end of all wars is like speaking of the end of all earthquakes.
While planning the nation’s capital, President Washington predicted, “The Grand Avenue connecting both the palace and the federal house will be most magnificent & most convenient.” Since then Pennsylvania Avenue has indeed seen days of glory and decades of neglect. The avenue has been the route of every inaugural parade since Jefferson’s. And in muffled splendor the funeral processions of seven Presidents who have died in office have followed this way. Early on, the avenue took shape as the District of Columbia’s central commercial artery. But in 1834 Charles Francis Adams noticed that “every thing wears the appearance of poverty and of want of permanency.” And in 1865 a foreign visitor wrote, “There is no cohesion about Pennsylvania Avenue. … It is an architectural conundrum which nobody can guess, and in which I candidly believe there is no meaning.”
Sorting through a relative’s trunk in Nottoway County, Virginia, Herbert Wheary found this uncommonly handsome tintype of a young Confederate, James C. Gill. Private Gill was in the thick of things. As a seventeen-year-old student, writes Wheary, “he enlisted in the Nottoway Greys and fought at the First Manassas (or Bull Run). In 1862 Gill was wounded at Frayser’s Farm. His brother was killed helping him from the field.
Wilbur Wright boarded a Big Four train at the Union Station in Dayton, Ohio, at 6:30 on the evening of Thursday, September 6, 1900. 33 years old, he was setting off on the first great adventure of his life. Other than a trip to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago with his younger brother, Orville, in 1893, Wilbur had ventured no farther than a bicycle ride from his home in more than sixteen years. Now he was traveling southeast through the night toward one of the most remote and isolated spots on the East Coast of the United States.
It was with utter amazement and terror that I read “Blizzard” in the February issue. Having read your publication since my father subscribed in the late 1950s, I can say without equivocation that it was the most moving essay I’ve had the pleasure of reading. It was not the most polished article, but rather the most moving.
As a resident of rural Iowa I am all too aware of the potential consequences of a winter blizzard. This article should be required reading for all school superintendents and school board members who think it is better to transport our children “before the storm gets any worse”; keep my children at school.