January 2011

by Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall; Chelsea Green Publishing Company; 405 pages; $16.95.

Who hasn’t been fascinated by an old cemetery? A graveyard can be not only a place for hallowing the dead but also a gallery of good and atrocious art, an exhibit field of curious poems, a final stage for the pageantry of vanity, and an epigrammatic museum of forgotten lives—all in a pretty park. Yet many of us either find cemeteries faintly morbid or tend to overlook them. Here, to show us what we’ve been missing, is an excellent guide to the cemeteries of New York, by the authors of a similar Baedeker of Parisian burial spots.

by Clark G. Reynolds; Pictorial Histories Publishing Company; 355 pages; paperback; $14.95.

by John W. Ripley; Shawnee County Historical Society, P.O. Box 56, Topeka, KS 66601; $5.50.

Inventing modern football …

SMU isn’t playing this year: the team has been benched for the season because alumni were giving money to the players. Somehow it seems college football is always in trouble. But it has never seen trouble like the trouble it saw eighty years ago. Players were dying, and the situation became so charged that President Teddy Roosevelt had to step in. Out of bitter controversy grew the game we know today.

“We will not do duty any longer for seven dollars per month” …

When he was given a uniform and a rifle, Sgt. William Walker believed he was a full-fledged Union soldier and would be paid like one. He was wrong. Walker was an ex-slave, and for insisting on his rights, he was charged with mutiny and sentenced to be shot. Otto Friedrich tells Walker’s story—and in the telling reveals the complex and bitter process that ended with sometime slaves armed and fighting the men who had held them in bondage.

Forgotten laughter …

I feel very much for the fate of Private Slovik, but also for Edward Woods’s role as an inexperienced defense counsel because I very nearly had the same terrible experience to live with for the rest of my life.

In Normandy, sometime in July 1944, I was appointed assistant defense counsel for a special court. My only qualification was a two- or three-hour credit course in business law at Oregon State College in 1939, which I nearly flunked. Defense counsel didn’t show, so it was left to me to do the Perry Mason bit and harass and confuse an inexperienced court to the degree that although we didn’t get an acquittal, the sentence was referred to the company commander. Company punishment was close enough to an acquittal that my “client” was no end happy.

My Philadelphia lawyer reputation must have spread, because corps HQ appointed me assistant defense counsel at a general court-martial for two GIs accused of murder and rape. Within minutes of receiving the order, I was writing a letter pointing out my complete inadequacy to defend men who were facing possible death sentences.

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

American Style: Classic Product Design from Airstream to Zippo Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself A Book of Days in American History Permanent New Yorkers: A Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of New York The Fighting Lady: The New Yorktown in the Pacific War “Having Wonderful Time”: Topeka in Postcards, 1907–1914

Written and photographed by Richard Sexton; Chronicle Books; 135 pages; $16.95.

William Mason worked out the Colt .45 revolver—the definitive hardware of Western outlaw and lawman alike—half a century before anybody thought up the term industrial design . Nevertheless, that lethally beautiful piece of sculpture is a prime example of it, and it takes its place in this book along with the Airstream Trailer, the Aladdin Workman’s Lunch Kit (that’s the lunchbox with the thermos in its rounded top), the Osterizer Blender, and 128 other products that reflect the author’s sense of the best of American industrial design.

In the fall of 1927 the Philadelphia advertising agency N. W. Ayer and Son came up with a campaign for the Ford Motor Company: a series of photographs of Ford’s thousand-acre industrial site on the Rouge River near Detroit, which would portray the company itself as an efficient machine, an icon of American industry. Ayer had a photographer in mind: a Philadelphian named Charles Sheeler.

I was most interested in the photograph of FDR in the July/August issue of American Heritage. Of course, we, like everyone else, had never seen this item before. It is most arresting evidence of the ravages of time and illness on the man. We have a number of photographs taken about two weeks previous to this one that show the same—but not as clearly and dramatically as the Robbins photograph does.

We are currently completing a general revision of our museum gallery devoted to President Roosevelt’s life, and we look forward to displaying a copy of the Robbins photograph.