by John Canemaker; Abbeville Press; 223 pages; $49.95.
Cartoon humor—like every other kind —ages poorly. The doings of Happy Hooligan are likely to bring ennui to the modern reader; those of the Katzenjammer Kids, despair. But Winsor McCay’s marvelous cartoons are as enchanting today as they were when he drew them eighty years ago. Partly this is because he relied more on fantasy than on jokes in his work, but mainly it is because McCay was a supremely fine draftsman.
by Jean H. Baker; W. W. Norton; 448 pages; $19.95.
Many Americans who are uncertain about what Abraham Lincoln’s wartime policies were, and who certainly couldn’t name his cabinet officers, have very firm opinions about his wife: she was detestable. Jean Baker’s revisionist biography of Mary Todd Lincoln explains this dislike as a classic instance of “male-ordered history” that is simply no longer acceptable.
by Douglas Southall Freeman; Scribner’s; three paperback volumes, $16.95 each.
After finishing his 1934 biography R. E. Lee , Douglas Southall Freeman wanted to step back a century and write about another great Virginian, George Washington. But he found, he said, “that mentally it was not easy to leave the struggle about which one had been writing for twenty years and more. A question plagued and pursued: In holding the light exclusively on Lee, had one put in undeserved shadow the many excellent soldiers of his army?” It took him the next ten years to lay to rest the ghosts of the men who labored for Lee.
by John Mack Famgher; Yale University Press; 280 pages, $25.00.
The first settler in Sugar Creek was Robert Pulliam, who came with five others in 1817 to hunt, trap, and, early the following spring, tap the great sugar maples of the area for their sap. The following year the Pulliam family moved there permanently.
The sugar bush they claimed had always been harvested by the Kickapoo Indians, whom the settlers pushed out in the seemingly inevitable way of westward expansion. The region’s sugar crop was so rich that the sweetening became legal tender, an early settler recalled.
The families that followed—first the men and later the women, children, and livestock—mostly acquired their farms illegally by squatting on lands held in the public domain. And they came in clans—siblings and cousins and in-laws of the first pioneers lured to the Sangamon River area by the tales sent home of its bounty.
WHEN THE IRAN-CONTRA STORY BROKE LAST NOVEMBER, A NUMBER OF public figures as well as news commentators put the revelations in a historical context. Walter Mondale said in a New York Times interview: “It was all so knowable. Did they really think they could get away with it—violate the law and nobody would care?...They were so full of hubris....”
Shades of Thucydides! Was Mondale really aware of the range of judgments he had brought reverberating back down through the ages? As witness to another democracy being shaken by adventurers two thousand years ago, Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War with the idea that “in the course of human things,” events would repeat themselves, that “the future...must resemble if not exactly reflect [the past].” Implicit was the hope that if people could recognize and understand the mistakes of the past, they would not repeat them.
The first sentence of William A. Nolen’s article “Bellevue: No One Was Ever Turned Away” in your February/March issue says that Bellevue is the oldest hospital in the United States. This is not, strictly speaking, true.
The very first semblance of American hospitals appeared in the early eighteenth century—hastily built structures intended to confine contagious disease. They were built primarily in seaport towns and were operational only during the course of a full-scale epidemic.
Later in the eighteenth century, another institution attempted to provide the continuous service that the early centers lacked. This was the almshouse, established solely for the care of a city’s poor. Almshouses performed a multitude of functions—they housed the destitute sick, they served as orphanages, they confined criminals, and they harbored the insane. Bellevue Hospital was established as such an almshouse in 1736 to house New York’s “poor, aged, insane, and disreputable.”
A decade ago Vanessa Redgrave gave one of her most memorable performances in the title role of Julia, the film based upon the most memorable chapter in Lillian Hellman’s best-selling memoir, Pentimento: her portrayal of the doomed heroine—cool, intelligent, courageous—symbolized antifascism at its most selfless. Jane Fonda was good, too, as Hellman herself: bright, earnest, spunky enough to undertake a risky secret mission into Hitler’s Germany on her friend’s behalf, later anguished at her powerlessness to save Julia from the Nazis, or to find and care for her baby, left behind in occupied Europe after her murder.
Until July 2, 1986, I felt comfortably detached from the current insider-trading scandal on Wall Street. That was the day I opened the business section of The New York Times and saw a photograph of a serious-looking young man above the caption, “Robert M. Wilkis, in 1976 photograph from the Stanford University Business School yearbook.”
Robert M. Wilkis? Bobby Wilkis! Bobby Wilkis and I grew up in the days recreated in the movie Diner, when every kid wanted to be John Unitas, no one had ever heard of Mitsubishi, and Ben Cartwright and his boys offered on “Bonanza” a weekly demonstration of the essential nobility of the American character. How in the world had Bobby Wilkis wound up with his picture in The New York Times under the headline 2 CHARGED IN BIG INSIDER CASE ?
In the land where all men are created equal, the Hudson Valley has been a special place where actual lords have presided over quasi-feudal manors, where industrialists have erected a string of chateaus as their country seats, where a landscape painter built himself a Persian castle on a mountaintop. The regal beauty of the river seems to have invited this attention. A tour of houses along its length, maintained as museums and open to the public, provides a panorama of successive generations of Americans rising to self-exaltation.
In the 1600s, when the Hudson was the road into a near wilderness, the Dutch in New Amsterdam and then the British in New York sought to populate the land by issuing feudal, European-style baronies on vast tracks up and down the river. The lord of a manor could lease plots of his land to tenant farmers, and the tenants could be required to pay stiff annual rents in perpetuity to keep their homes. A few of the old manor houses still survive.