January 2011

Churchill: A Nephew’s View San Francisco Mail San Francisco Mail San Francisco Mail Author, Author! Mortal Statistics Wrong Street Hanged, Not Shot Barbed-Wire Wars Another Source Can Yankees Spell? First, Not Last

William Tecumseh Sherman,” announced The New York Times near the end of the Civil War, “has surpassed all newspaper correspondents in writing about military affairs...for conciseness, perspicacity and comprehensiveness with brevity he is the perfect model.” One Associated Press reporter went so far as to say that the man would have been an even better war correspondent than a general.

But most newspapermen knew Sherman as a relentless enemy. As late as April 1865, a New York Tribune correspondent wrote that “a cat in hell without claws is nothing to a reporter in General Sherman’s army.”

From the First Battle of Bull Run to the end of the war, Sherman believed far more harm than good was done the Union cause by war correspondents. They were “dirty newspaper scribblers who have the impudence of Satan.” They were “spies and defamers.” They were “infamous lying dogs.”

IN LATE APRIL OF 1863, POISED FOR A TWO-corps crossing of the Mississippi forty roundabout miles below Vicksburg, Grant suggested to Sherman, whose corps had remained north of the objective to mislead its defenders as to where the blow would land, that the deception would be far more effective if he would stage a “heavy demonstration” against the Chickasaw Bluffs—a threat that, if successful, would give the attackers a clear shot at the city just beyond. “But I am loth to order it,” Grant added, explaining that the newspapers would be likely to “characterize it as a repulse,” much as they had done when Sherman first tried it, back in December, and was raked over the journalistic coals for the fruitless loss of 1,776 men in the attempt. “I therefore leave it to you whether to make such a demonstration,” the message ended.

Because Sherman wasn’t the last general to bash the press, American Heritage asked one of the United States’s most outspoken newspaper editors, Benjamin C. Bradlee of the Washington Post, to read the letters published here.

“General Sherman’s relations with the press were already legendary,” Bradlee commented. “In fact, they were lousy. After all, he arrested and court-martialed a reporter for the New York Herald, which was the principal supporter of President Lincoln.

“But these letters show new talents for invective. Generals who can write always make me nervous.

“From today’s vantage point, the press seems to have been way out of line, unaware that their dispatches were given vital information to the Confederate generals.”

Photographs by O. Winston Link; Abrams; 144 pages; $35.00.

Every so often during the late 1950s, the New York industrial photographer O. Winston Link would load his car with flash equipment, lock up his Thirty-fourth Street studio, and head toward one of the small Southern towns where the steam locomotives of the Norfolk and Western were charging magnificently toward their extinction. Link liked working steam—he began his career photographing trains in the New Jersey yards of the B&O—and he wanted to get it down before it vanished.

Preservation Press; 128 pages; $34.95.

A portion of the next issue is devoted to notable American women—and to looking at the changes that have overtaken the lives of all American women. The stories include:

Let them all be damned—I’ll do as I please…”

So said Georgia O’Keeffe, and what she pleased was to produce a body of coolly ardent paintings that put her in the vanguard of this century’s American artists. Up until her death last year, at the age of ninety-eight, she played the invincible loner with increasing authority and conviction. But the truth was more interesting, as Edward Abrahams reveals in a portrait of O’Keeffe’s early years.

The Peabody sisters…

These three New England women led very different lives—one was a reformer, one was deeply in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne, one waited ten years for Horace Mann to get over his grief for his first wife. Each was fascinating in her own right, and taken together their lives reveal a great deal about the choices women have always faced.

One of the more unlikely results of the American Revolution was Australia. Most American colonists came here voluntarily, of course, but until 1776 we meekly accepted boatloads of His Majesty’s convicts as indentured servants. Then, after our unexpected victory over the world’s most powerful nation (and with thousands of fresh African slaves conveniently arriving on the Atlantic Coast each year), we righteously barred our gates to those unfortunates whom Jeremy Bentham would call an “excrementitious mass.” Forced to seek a new dumping ground for what it firmly believed was an incurably criminal class, the Crown chose a new spot as far from Britain as possible—empty Australia, fourteen thousand miles away, on the other side of the world.

At one point in the 1960s, according to a story told in David HaIberstam’s mammoth history of twentieth-century media giants, The Powers That Be, William Paley, the chairman of CBS, was puzzled by the failure of a restaurant he had opened in the CBS headquarters building in Manhattan. He suggested to the restaurant’s manager that perhaps they should turn it into a supper club for people who wanted a late dinner after a play or concert. “Bill,” his manager informed him sadly, “there ain’t no supper business in this town.”

“No?” said the man who ran CBS. “Why not?”

The explanation was simple: “Because everyone’s home watching the tube.”

Very few people who visit the Virgin Islands go in search of history—sun and duty-free shopping are more powerful lures. But once there it’s difficult not to give the past at least some thought. Alexander Hamilton grew up on St. Croix, and the U.S. Navy has been an intermittent presence in the islands since 1822, when President Monroe dispatched a squadron in pursuit of pirates. But American culture is only one ingredient in a rich blend.