January 2011

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.

I just received my very first issue of American Heritage (July/August), and 1 was particularly impressed with the “Then and Now” photos of the Cleveland glass shopping arcade. The layout was unlike many then-and-now photos I’ve seen, which were taken at careless and sloppy angles, making it all but impossible to compare the two pictures. My highest compliments to your photographer.

It has been said that motor sport was the first organized activity in America that drew all social classes together. Certainly William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., and Barney Oldfield would have been unlikely to have exchanged pleasantries otherwise. Vanderbilt, elegant, impeccably groomed, was scion to one of the world’s great fortunes, whose childhood attack of the measles made the society pages, whose wedding occupied eight full news columns in New York papers. Oldfield, stocky, sometimes disheveled, invariably with a stubby cigar clenched in his teeth, was a former bellhop and newsboy, profane and anti-establishment, whose name appeared only on sports pages and the occasional police blotter. The races on the long stretch of sand linking Ormond and Daytona brought them together, racing against each other and against the clock.

One of the pleasant burdens of friendship, and of living in a renowned and intimidating great city like New York, is that friends planning to visit will ask me to show them the sights of some quarter of town, most usually in the borough of Manhattan, county of New York.

Perhaps because I once taught economic history, the odds are that I will be asked to walk Wall Street with them. Since I am a bit of an antiquarian and a long-distance walker with a reputation for being lippy (New Yorkese for garrulous), I usually suggest Greenwich Village or, better, a walk of decent length from the Village through SoHo and Little Italy into the City Hall area and across Brooklyn Bridge, ending amid the brownstone elegance and quietude of Brooklyn Heights.

Rebutting Sherman Rebutting Sherman Another Dreamer The Three Elevens Commencement Oratory Last Picture Then and Really Now

Much as we may admire General Sherman’s military skills, it would be a mistake to endorse his crabby, self-serving attacks on the press (“The New Sherman Letters,” July/August).

After an initial shakedown period the hundred-odd war correspondents for the North accepted reasonable restraints on where they might go and what they might report. Even in the war’s early days, their lapses of security never cost the Union a major battle, much less a campaign. Some of them were killed, and a larger number captured. A few reporters brought in valuable intelligence gathered in forays between the lines, and one —Henry Wing—brought an anxious Lincoln the first news that Grant’s army was safe after the Battle of the Wilderness.

Differences between the news media and the professional military establishment continue smoldering today. The current truce will not likely be permanent.

Also smoldering is the resentment (or worse) toward Sherman in the South, even though his total war tactics mercifully hastened the Confederacy’s inevitable end. One cannot expect Southerners to acclaim him, but their irrational bitterness has denied this military genius the place in history that he justly deserves. A small example: There is no memorial to General Sherman at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, where monuments and memorials to heroic graduates abound.

Zounds, Annie Dillard, where were you when I was a kid? (“The French and Indian War: A Memoir,” July/August)

I, too, grew up thrilled at the idea that I may have stood on the very same spot as an Indian or a French or British soldier gazing at the Allegheny River snaking through the rolling hills some twenty miles upstream from Fort Pitt. I played on those hills more than ten years where the Raystown Path met the Allegheny, in the “Indian Caves” and the foundation of the log cabin burned during Pontiac’s War. Our nightly campfires were theirs, and our heads filled with bloody and terrifvins massacres.

Our local school students don’t know the origin of Veterans Day. They don’t know it was first called Armistice Day. They have not learned of “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”

My mother told how she knew the war was over in 1918. She was hanging her laundry on the clothesline when the local coal-mine whistles started to blow at eleven o’clock. There was no radio then. Of course, eleven o’clock in France was six hours ahead of eleven o’clock local time. The news had come to this country, and telephone switchboard operators called other operators across the country. Our local switchboard operator called the local coal mine.

Indispensable to any walking tour of Gotham is the AIA Guide to New York City , a thorough survey of the city’s buildings put out by the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (Collier Books). It is available in bookstores, but the more specific histories of Wall Street the author recommends must be retrieved from libraries: Robert Sobel’s The Big Board (The Free Press, 1965) covers the story of the stock market in entertaining detail; Money Town , by Frederick L. Collins (Putnam, 1946), is a general history of the Manhattan Toe from Henry Hudson’s discovery of the island to the days of illusory prosperity before the crash.