January 2011

For better than four years now I have been writing about Franklin Roosevelt’s youth, seeking the sources of the serene selfassurance that served him and his country so well during the two worst crises since the Civil War. In the course of that work I have spent months at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, burrowing through his papers in search of clues.

Sometimes, after the reading room closes at 4:45 sharp, I put off retreating to my motel room across the old Albany Post Road and wander along a path that leads beneath ancient evergreens and past the tall hemlock hedges that wall the garden in which Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt lie buried, to the lawn that overlooks the Hudson just south of Springwood, the big, comfortable house in which FDR was born and to which he returned more than two hundred times during his dozen years as President.

For anyone interested in history, the $1.50 ticket that gets you into Springwood must be one of the best bargains in the country. Armed with one, you can wander through the Roosevelt home; visit the Roosevelt Library, with its galleries devoted to the lives of both FDR and his wife; and then go upriver for a tour of the Frederick W. Vanderbilt mansion just two miles north on Route 9, the old Albany Post Road. (A visit to Eleanor Roosevelt’s Val-Kill Cottage is free, but the short bus ride to and from Springwood, which is available between April and October, costs $1.95.)

FDR was fond of contrasting what he called the “comparatively simple style of living” that he believed his mother’s home exemplified with the Vanderbilts’ establishment. His secretary William Hassett once tried to puzzle out in his diary exactly what the President had in mind when he made that comparison. “There are varying degrees of simplicity,” he wrote. “I doubt if many rigors went with the life he speaks of. It probably was not Spartan. What he means, I suppose, is that the old-fashioned families didn’t show off.”

The synthetic colors of the motel in Albuquerque, all orange, purple, and blatant red, shouting the triumph of American civilization over the surrounding harshness, quickly fade from mind as we head out for Santa Fe. The great desert is upon us, like nothing you have seen elsewhere, something “other,” the floor of the world from the first day of creation. Only an occasional crag sprouting from the cracked surface distracts you from the overpowering emptiness as the perfect highway snakes its way on and on this early in the morning. No one else is on it, and at first there is nothing on either side except the bristling brush, an occasional arroyo long gone dry, and the dead-looking cactus.

As one of your addicts, I was delighted with the August/September 1986 issue of American Heritage. For one thing, I was once a Fuller Brush Man. For another, I went through the Great Depression (“The Big Picture of the Great Depression”) during my teens. For yet another, trying to make a new career as a writer, I found ironic solace in reading “The Blighted Life of the Writer, Circa 1840.” As for “Positively the Last Word on Baseball,” thanks, but I wish Elting E. Morison would furnish a glossary for sport fans residing outside the United States and Japan. But the high point of my reading of this particular issue was Richard Rhodes’s article, “The Toughest Flying in the World.”

Professor Garraty’s conclusion in "101 Things Every College Graduate Should Know About American History” (December 1986) that the Dred Scott decision of 1857 was “The Worst Supreme Court Decision” is definitely arguable.

I firmly believe that Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion in the case was the most fortuitous Supreme Court decision—the one that saved the Union- despite its immediate consequences. My reasoning has to do with the decision’s timing, not its wretched conclusions. By the late 185Os both the North and South were in a lather over the extension of slavery, and slavery itself. Clearly, however, only the South was contemplating disunion, and at a time when a weak, foolish, and irresolute leader, James Buchanan, was President of the United States.

Lacking Lincoln’s utter resolution that the Union must be saved, and without his rhetorical genius and political skills, Buchanan might well have lost the Union for good, as a leaderless people accepted the Confederacy, in disgust, but as the lesser of two evils.

Professor Garraty is one of my favorite American historians, but I do think that his list in the December issue really ought to include the Gettysburg Address, which my generation remembers verbatim. Also there’s this souvenir of the 1940 presidential election that left Republicans unamused: A horse’s tail is long and silky/Lift it up—there’s Wendell Willkie! ”

American Heritage, which is one of the few magazines we retain longer than three years, has always been one that provides the sort of esoteric information that is so difficult for the public-library patron to obtain easily. Please keep up the consistently fine quality of your articles for the sake of all those eager readers of American history.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a column lamenting the very small number of video cassettes available to those of us who like historical documentaries. That situation hasn’t improved much since, but 1 have found some consolation in the fact that video stores do carry a good many fiction films with historical settings, many of which never got the theatrical attention they deserved. Here are several rentable, small-scale films you may have missed and which especially interested me because of the way they portrayed the past:

Dreamchild (1985)