January 2011

If Mr. Friedrich’s intention in “We Will Not Do Duty Any Longer for Seven Dollars per Month” (February issue) is to play to the black soldier and to the black race, if his intention is to cause additional black-white racial confrontations, if his intention is to color the truth for an ideology, then he has succeeded admirably.

But to use William Walker as an example of an outstanding black soldier who was deliberately persecuted is an absolute disgrace and a historical travesty. Walker was not a good soldier; he could not have been. From what Friedrich says, and the evidence he himself offers, Walker should have been shot for his actions on two other occasions.

Finally, to pull the incident out of its context and to put it into modern philosophic terms is ridiculous.

Otto Friedrich replies: I am sorry to see that Mr. Garland seems to have learned nothing from my article, nor anything from the events of the past 25 years, or, for that matter, the past 125.

It is always distressing to encounter writing about earlier legal proceedings that reflects ignorance of the law then in effect. Otto Friedrich, discussing the 1864 trial of Sgt. William Walker by general court-martial, states, “For some mysterious reason Walker never testified in his own defense.”

That circumstance would not have been at all mysterious to anyone acquainted with the law that governed trials in 1864. For until Congress passed the Act of March 16, 1878, no person accused of any federal offense, whether civil or military, was ever permitted to testify on his own behalf.

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.

In your February issue’s fine article about FDR, who’s a hero to me, too, the estimable William E. Leuchtenburg tells us that “in the most recent survey of historians, [FDR] moved past George Washington to be ranked as the second greatest President in our history, excelled only by the legendary Abraham Lincoln.”

This makes me wonder what in heck historians read. It’s no knock on either Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Lincoln to say that without Mr. Washington there would have been no unity, no independence, no nationhood. The survey was about Presidencies, not men, I know, I know. But had another man than George been the .first President, would there have been a second?

FDR’s genius for touching the hearts of ordinary men and women, as described by William Leuchtenburg, was not restricted to American citizens. He also commanded tremendous respect in Britain, and British workers, servicemen, and servicewomen during World War II adored their loyal friend “Mr. Roosevelt.”

Early in the war a song went around the British Isles: “Thanks, Mr. Roosevelt —it’s swell of you—the way you’re helping us to carry on.”

In those dark days we always tuned in to the BBC’s “Workers’ Playtime,” a lunchtime variety show which traveled around munitions and armament works. During these performances large audiences of factory girls would sing the “Mr. Roosevelt” song with a brand of affection that has almost been lost on the winds of history.

Likely as not, when René Descartes invented his grid system of coordinates in the 17th century, he did not have Carroll, Iowa, in mind. No matter. Carroll, like the rest of the state and a good deal of the nation, is laid out in a Cartesian grid. For this geometric landscape we have the Ordinance of 1785 to thank. In that year, Congress enacted a law “for ascertaining the mode of disposing of lands in the Western territory.” The West in those days was a good deal closer to the Atlantic than the Pacific, so it was Ohio that was first laid out according to the new legislation: in townships six by six miles square, each divided into 36 one-square-mile sections of 640 acres apiece, the boundaries aligned with meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude.

When I was ten, my brother was accepted into a college in Kansas. My parents decided to drive him out from New Jersey, using the opportunity to show both of us the countryside as we went. The year was 1963.

Because we were on a budget, we normally ate at Howard Johnson’s restaurants. This was fine with me. I was allowed to order the same thing at every meal: a turkey club sandwich with a strawberry milk shake. My brother, more adventurous, ate clams whenever he found them on the menu, never giving a thought to the fact that we were squarely in the center of the country, a thousand miles in either direction from salt water.

But those meals are indistinct in memory. The meal I recall most vividly from that trip was a lunch we had somewhere in eastern Kansas. My father, tearing along the highway at the approved speed of 80 miles an hour, spotted a pair of golden arches rising above one of the few hills we encountered in an entire day of driving.

My boat lifted and fell in the gentle ocean swell a few miles seaward from Cape Disappointment off the mouth of the Columbia River. Although the summer morning was calm, my exposed offshore position made me nervous. I was in a small boat I had built for a journey up the Columbia, not for a voyage on the open ocean. But the journey had to begin from the sea if I was to approach the river, cross its bar, and then travel upstream as a sailing ship had done nearly two centuries ago to begin the first chapter of the river’s recorded history.

An ebbing tide had carried me away from the coast, through the ship channel, and out past the broken ends of the two stone jetties that define the outer ramparts of the river mouth. Sea birds skittered before me and then resettled on the sea in clusters, preening themselves as they bobbed up and down ons the ocean waves. A distant bell buoy clanged in the slow roll of the long Pacific swells. There were no other boats or ships around.

About Sergeant Walker About Sergeant Walker Some Blizzard No. 1 First No. 1 First Different Visions Different Visions Fred Fans Fred Fans Too Big to See

The yearning to travel—from place to place as well as in time—impelled us to devote last April’s issue to the subject. I asked Senior Editor Carla Davidson, who was in charge of the major components of that issue, as well as this one, to tell me how she went about her work: