January 2011

William Manchester has been very industrious in collecting stories about my uncle, Winston Churchill, and some entertaining ones from what my uncle would have called the Servants (“The Lion Caged,” February/March issue).

I do not think that any compilation of Churchilliana, however well done—and Mr. Manchester’s extract is very readable —can ever give a true picture of the man. There is so much falsehood mixed up with the truth.

To begin with he was not neglected by his parents any more than he was a dunce at school. These were myths he invented himself. He was a very naughty and objectionable little boy, and both his parents were very concerned with his welfare, more so than he ever was with his own children at the same age.

I hope I don’t sound chauvinistic, but the statement from Richard Reinhardt’s article on San Francisco in the April issue about “upstart towns like … San Jose” struck a nerve. After all, San Jose was founded in 1777, a year after Captain de Anza was scouting the area that would, quite a bit later, become San Francisco. Perhaps we in San Jose should regard San Francisco as the upstart town that shares our bay!

I have just read Richard Reinhardt’s excellent article on San Francisco in the April issue. The photograph of our Golden Gate Bridge is reversed! Inexcusable! May the ghost of engineer Joseph Strauss haunt your editorial offices on the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of this magnificent span!

Richard Reinhard! refers to the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge. How about mentioning the fact that its neighbor, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, had its fiftieth anniversary last November 12? In case you are wondering why a non-San Franciscan is writing about this, it is because I, too, celebrated a fiftieth birthday last November 12. My first trip outside the Midwest was to California in the summer of 1946.1 remember the bridges of San Francisco as one of the very special sights and learned with great pride that fall that the Bay Bridge and I were twins. The Golden Gate Bridge generally gets more publicity, but as a twin I did feel I should write in defense of my bridge. In spite of this, I always enjoy your magazine.

David McCullough in his article “Why I Love Washington” in the April/May 1986 issue wrote: “Not everyone, 1 realize, cares for Washington as I do. ‘Neither Rome nor home,’ somebody once said.” I am that “someone.”

My complete quotation (“How shall you act the natural man in this/Invented city, neither Rome nor home?”) is in granite in Western Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Attached to the quotation is my name, as well as the year, 1952, which was the publication date of my book Cape Horn and Other Poems . I am the only living author among the thirty-six quoted in Western Plaza, and 1 am writing to insist on the unwritten law that when quotations are used in an article, it is a sin not to furnish the name of the author.

There has not been a major biography of Sherman since Lloyd Lewis’s lively 1932 book, Sherman: Fighting Prophet, but Da Capo Press has recently reprinted the general’s 1875 memoirs, and they are eloquent and fascinating. In August 1962 this magazine ran the great British soldier-historian B. H. Liddell Hart’s assessment of Sherman as “the world’s first modern ‘man of war.’”

Only one man in town today remembers him, even vaguely, although he took 560 pictures of Corpus Christi businesses and the people in them during the month of February, 1934. He kept no receipt book, and didn’t put the usual commercial stamp on any of his prints. In spite of a diligent search, which has been successful in identifying most of his subjects, no hint has come to light of who the photographer was.

His pictures have been preserved almost by accident. While working in Corpus Christi, the itinerant persuaded George Tallmadge, whose own photographic business was slack, to share his studio darkroom with him. Tallmadge perhaps even worked as his “proof-passer,” the man who returned to show the proofs to the subject. When the itinerant moved on, he left all his five-by-seven glass plates with Tallmadge, who later passed them on to Dr. John F. McGregor, a chiropractor and the city’s leading amateur photographer. Out of respect, McGregor took care of the plates until 1976, when he donated them to the Photography Collection of the University of Texas at Austin.

The French and Indian War! This was a war of which I, reading stretched out in my bedroom, could not get enough. The names of the places were a litany: Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, Fort Frontenac on the St. Lawrence, Vincennes on the Wabash. The names of the people were a litany: Captain Claude-Pierre Pécaudy, Sieur de Contrecoeur; the Swiss commander of Fort Pitt, Simeon Ecuyer; the great Indian fighter Col. Henry Bouquet; Maj. Robert Rogers of the Rangers; the Sieur de Marin; the Marquis de Montcalm; the Seneca chief Half-King. There was an outlandish-sounding Miami chief on the Ohio whom the English called “Old Britain” and the French called “La Demoiselle.”

How witless in comparison were the clumsy wars of Europe. On some open field at nine o’clock sharp, soldiers in heavy armor, dragged from their turnip patches in feudal obedience to Lord So-and-So, met in long ranks the heavily armored men owned or paid for by Lord Such-and-Such and defeated them by knocking them over like ninepins. What was at stake? The succession of Maria Theresa at the death of Charles VI. Phooey.

Every once in a while someone says to me, “If American Heritage didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it.” While these words are gratifying, I have always dismissed them as genial but irrelevant. After all, we do exist and we do what we do as a matter of course. But looking over the contents of this particular issue, I’m struck by the number of pieces that embody our franchise: to make American history important to the living generation, to show how the past shapes the present. For example: Reaching back over a century to the drama of the Civil War, we were lucky to be offered that rarest of historical treasures: new primary documents—original letters—from the hand of one of our nation’s greatest soldiers, William Tecumseh Sherman. The heart of these missives is Sherman’s deep anger at Northern newspapers for betraying his battle plans to the enemy. No general of any era can be indifferent to the dangers of secrets passed on—wittingly or not—to the forces determined to destroy him. The Sherman letters, we think you’ll agree, are history at its most personal, most significant, and most explosive.

During the seventy-five years since Hiram Bingham first climbed the knifelike ridge above the Urubamba canyon, in Peru, and set foot in the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu, thousands following his trail have felt their spirits lifted by the grandeur of the setting and the splendor of the granite ruins. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was inspired to make Machu Picchu the focus of an epic poem on human suffering and aspiration. Scholars, unable to find a written record of its building or its builders, have puzzled over the mystery of its origin. Inevitably the ruined city, often half hidden by the vapors that drift up from the chasms below, has been the subject of myth.