January 2011

When Marshall Field intervened in an argument between his clerk and a customer to admonish, “Give the lady what she wants,” he inaugurated the motto for his department store and enunciated the attitude of all the great family-owned department stores of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But this simple and satisfactory relationship between buyer and seller no longer exists in the post-World War II era of corporate and conglomerate ownership. I wrote “A Sad Heart at the Department Store” ( The American Scholar , Spring 1985) to explore the changes brought about by the new economic arrangements.

Peter Baida replies: I plead guilty to the charge of believing that “consumer choice shapes the economy,” and I’m not persuaded that my attachment to this “mythology” means that I’m inattentive to the economic history of the twentieth century. Anyone who is tempted to doubt the importance of consumer choice should count the number of Edsels parked outside the nearest department store, and compare it with the number of Toyotas.

For the rest, I apologize if I seemed to suggest that Ms. Rosenberg condones shoplifting, and I would like to repeat that, as I said in my column, I found much to admire in her essay, as well as much to question.

Shall we have a King?” John Jay asked George Washington in 1787, when the new nation, still pinned together only by the Articles of Confederation, seemed likely to fly apart. More than any other man, Washington would make sure that the answer to that plaintive query was a resounding no. But his own sense of the Presidency was itself fairly kingly; guests at his Philadelphia levees were not to speak to him unless spoken to, nor would he shake their hands—to ensure that no one dared try to press his flesh, he rested one hand upon the hilt of his dress sword and held a specially made false hat in the other.

It was Washington, too, who determined that his successors should live in a “palace” in the new federal capital to be built on the Potomac; he personally chose the site for it with Pierre L’Enfant, in 1791, and initially favored that turbulent Frenchman’s plan for a residence five times the size of the one that we now know.

Some things ought to be sacred—for instance, the things you learn in your seventh-grade social studies class. I learned the stories of America’s Great Men. (This was in 1962, before social studies teachers discovered women.) One of the great men was Eli Whitney.

The story of Eli Whitney as taught to me in the seventh grade was simple. It was the story that Allan Nevins and Jeannette Mirsky had told in The World of Eli Whitney, published in 1952. “As his invention of the cotton gin altered forever the history of the American South,” Nevins and Mirsky wrote, “so Whitney’s sustained work in the manufacture of muskets changed the social and economic growth of the North and gave it its industrial might.” Whitney “fathered the American system of interchangeable manufacture” that led directly to Henry Ford and modern mass production.

This June 6 many ceremonies will mark the anniversary of the most massive amphibious invasion in history. One of them will be held at the U.S. military cemetery just east of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, a small French village on the Normandy coast. At the cemetery are buried 9,386 American soldiers. But there are other GIs who died that day who do not rest at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer. Assigned to lead the very first wave, the men who lost their lives in the forefront of the D-day invasion not only have been denied a decent burial but they have been denied their rightful place in history.

1837 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1937 Fifty Years Ago

On May 10 New York City’s banks took a drastic step to protect themselves from their panicked depositors, who for weeks had been withdrawing their funds in coin rather than in the unreliable paper currency. The banks announced that they would temporarily part with no more gold or silver. Other banks around the country followed suit. It could no longer be denied: America’s unstable economic structure had toppled. The crisis came to be called the Panic of 1837, a time when fortunes evaporated overnight, companies crashed by the hundreds, and massive unemployment left the working class bereft. It ended in a severe depression that lasted six years.

Bernard A. Weisberger is right on the mark. His perceptive essay should be read by everyone involved or interested in history, education, or where this country is going.

In the early seventies my sister took an American history survey course in college. The course did not cover the Civil War. Her teacher did not consider the Civil War an important part of a course in American history.

A few years after that, a young American history professor was quoted as answering a question about his research into life in a Revolutionary War-era village. He stated he did not consider it “relevant” to mention the effects of the war itself on the life of this village. Apparently only the “world” was turned upside down by the results of the war, not the village.

History is an inherently interesting and appealing subject. Weisberger does a first-rate job in documenting how history as an academic subject has become so boring, and so different from history as a field. This change has been an extraordinary process, showing collective tunnel vision on the part of academic historians.

After knocking out his opponent with a sledgehammer right in the eighth round, Joe Louis became the world’s heavyweight boxing champion in Chicago’s Comiskey Park on June 22. “Louis was young, strong, and good,” recalled the defending titleholder, James J. Braddock. “Oh, he was good . And I did my best, but come the eighth round, I was finished.” When the final punch landed, Braddock buckled and kissed the canvas.

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

Mutiny on the Amistad Wild West Bartenders’ Bible