January 2011

No book has been written about the case of William Walker, but Otto Friedrich recommends several general studies of blacks in the Union Army: Thomas Went-worth Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment , originally published in 1869 and reprinted in a Norton paperback in 1984; Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment , by Willie Lee Rose, Oxford paperback, 1976; One Gallant Rush: Robert Could Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment , by Peter Burchard, published in 1965 by St. Martin’s Press. On the subject of New York’s draft riots, he suggests James McCague’s The Second Rebellion, The Story of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 . This was published by Dial Press in 1968.

Jude Wanniski was among the early leaders in the revival of supply-side economic theory. A former associate editor of The Wall Street Journal, he founded and is president of the consulting firm Polyconomics, Inc., which is located in Morristown, New Jersey, and advises leading corporations and institutional investors on economics, politics, and communications. In 1978, his pioneering book on economic theory and history, The Way the World Works., was published. In it, he draws heavily on historical precedent to argue that low tax rates are essential not merely to the wealth of a nation, but to the welfare of its citizens and the progress of society. His ideas have significantly influenced the Reagan administration. Interestingly, he has no formal training in economics (he holds a B.A. in political science and an M.S. in journalism from UCLA); but the late chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, once observed to him that this was precisely his advantage.

I am sorry we have lost William Safire to that anomaly “historical novelist” (December 1987). When Safire says that he can “reveal more of the truth by using fiction,” he has convinced only himself. Apparently “truth” is what Safire thinks it is and. therefore, it is mere editorial opinion. As any editor knows, send five reporters out to cover the same story, and you will get five different versions.

Safire’s problem is exactly what he himself told Schlesinger: “If I thought of writing it [ Freedom ] as history, I was afraid I couldn’t make it come alive.”

So Safire leaves us to contemplate in all seriousness that neither journalism nor historical truth can “come alive” as flesh and blood. However, the only difference between a good journalist and a good historian is that the journalist tells it like it is, and the historian tells it like it was.

What we need in this country are more good historians who can empathize with people across the ages and more good novelists who know how to create, with the common knowledge that they are not the same.

I would like to commend Geoffrey C. Ward for his comments on Shelby Foote’s fine work (December 1987). I can’t conceive of any historian, amateur or professional, who hasn’t enjoyed The Civil War: A Narrative . The thought that narrative ability somehow stamps a work as not serious or unscholarly is absurd. Let those who believe this suffer for their pedantic tendencies. I am pleased that Foote’s book is. again, in print. It’s a perfect excuse to reread this classic.

My first recollection of any event connected with history or the political process is a speech made to me in the fall of 1932 by Jimmy Gallagher, the son of the apartment house superintendent. In a surprising gesture of amity (he was usually trying to hit me), he confided that his father was voting for Roosevelt “because Roosevelt drinks sweet wine and Hoover drinks sour wine.”

Economic panic is simply a heightening of the emotions that always determine our behavior in the marketplace—where greed and fear are opposite ends of the same spectrum. Madly exhilarated, we bet on the promise of ever-expanding future wealth; madly depressed, we hoard our mite. The old and experienced are better at hoarding than spending, but that is just another form of betting.

Some days I awake radical, by noon I’m liberal, at dinner conservative, and by bedtime reactionary. But finding it hard to sleep as a reactionary, I fumble around in the cabinet of my mind for the liberal potion. On other—more ordinary—days, the winds of change don’t sweep through in a predictable sequence, and I’m astonished by the weather.

In the vast literature about FDR, the author particularly recommends the first of James MacGregor Burns’s volumes on Roosevelt’s Presidency, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt Brace, 1956); Frank Freidel’s Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal (Little, Brown, 1973), which is the fourth volume of his ongoing study; The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), which is the second volume of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s trilogy. Rexford G. Tugwell’s The Democratic Roosevelt (Doubleday, 1959); and the second volume of Kenneth S. Davis’s biography FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933–1937 (Random House, 1986). Leuchtenburg’s own books on this subject include Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (Harper & Row, 1963), which won the Parkman and Bancroft prizes in 1964, and In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (Cornell University Press, 1983).

Probing westward along the streets of Manhattan, the first light of Sunday, October 29,1933 revealed, stretched out in a doorway on Sixth Avenue, near Fifty-second Street, under the el, a well-dressed elderly man, solidly built and balding, with a little patch of fine white hair, an inverted triangle, at the center of his forehead. He was dead. Letters in an inside jacket pocket identified him as George B. Luks, the artist, of 140 East Twenty-eighth Street, and an examination of his corpse established that he had been felled by a heart attack. Most of the dead man’s friends assumed, on learning of his death, that he had met his end in a drunken brawl.

This is in honor of Sergeant William Walker, of the 3d South Carolina Infantry Regiment, a young black soldier who believed in the United States government’s promises of equal rights. This is in honor of Sergeant William Walker, who was brave enough to act on his belief in his rights. This is in honor of Sergeant William Walker, who died in disgrace, executed by the United States government for acting on his belief in its promise of equal rights.

Sipping lemonade or soda through straws before this year was an uncertain practice—hollow stalks of rye were used, and they were often dirty and cracked. But on January 3 a patent was given to Marvin Chester Stone of Washington, D.C., for drinking straws made from paraffin-coated manila paper. On lofty verandas and humble porches around the country, the manner in which Americans consumed cool drinks on hot summer afternoons was changed forever.