January 2011

They left behind great names —the Divine Elm, the Justice Elm, the Pride of the State, the Green Tree. In their dappled shade countless towns found repose, places like Elmhurst, Illinois; Elm Grove, Wisconsin; and New Haven, Connecticut, “City of Elms.” The trees carried the names of American heroes: the William Penn Treaty Elm, the Washington Elm, the Lincoln Elm. Under trees such as these, revolutions were pledged, treaties signed, oaths of office taken. But during the last fifty years, America’s big elms have disappeared, victims of Dutch elm disease.

What impressed me [about the June/July issue] was not only the great variety of subjects but the depth of each article. Rarely do I read a magazine that is both educational and interesting.

Amos ’n’ Andy were white? (“Gods of Pennsylvania Station,” August/September issue.)

Freeman Gosden as Amos and Charles Correll as Andy were indeed white in the famous radio series of ‘Amos ’n’ Andy.” However, when the show was transferred to television in 1951, the parts were played by the black actors Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams. Never as much of a hit on television, the show was taken off the air in 1953, partly because it was offensive to blacks.

TIME: Summer, 1628.

PLACE: Merry Mount, a small coastal settlement on the edge of the Massachusetts wilderness. “Pilgrim” Plymouth lies somewhat to the south; “Puritan” Boston will not be founded for another two years.

ACTION: A group of young revelers, Englishmen and Indians together, dance around a lofty maypole. There is food and drink aplenty; jollity reigns. Caught in the spirit of the moment, the revelers do not sense an alien presence in the forest nearby. Then a band of Pilgrim foot soldiers bursts onto the scene. The dancing stops. The maypole comes down. Merry Mount will be merry no more.

There is a wealth of legends about Thomas Morton but little more factual material than appears in this story. However, for a general picture of Morion’s time and place, John Demos recommends Edmund S. Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Little, Brown and Company, 1962), “still one of the best accounts of those early settlements.” The same time and place, with more emphasis on the local Indians, is also explored in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon (Hill & Wang, 1983). And for readers who want to see it all with their own eyes, a visit to The Plimoth Plantation itself, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is rewarding.

In 1920, when Richard Samuel Roberts’ name first appeared in the Columbia, South Carolina city directory—in the “Colored Dept.“—he was listed as a janitor in the post office. He continued in that job, the kind of job a black man was expected to have in his strictly segregated city, even after he had established an ambitious photography business in the black community. Self-taught, he learned his craft by studying brochures and catalogs sent by supply houses. The result was an extraordinary array of dignified and beautiful pictures of a little-known society. Now, 50 years after his death, Roberts’ photographs have been rediscovered. The glass negatives, which were stored in the crawl space under the family house, have been retrieved and many of the subjects painstakingly identified. A book of these photographs, A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936, will be published this fall by Bruccoli Clark/Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Judge Miller B. Zobel’s thoughtful analysis of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s character (June/July) was presaged by H. L. Mencken in a 1930 issue of The American Mercury : “Let us think of him as something that he undoubtedly was in his Pleistocene youth and probably remained ever after, to wit, a soldier. … On at least three days out of four, during his long years on the bench, the learned justice remained the soldier.…”

In David McCullough’s “I Love Washington” (April/May issue), the author says that Truman “in Woodrow Wilson’s war … learned a military pace of 120 Steps a minute.” Please note that for many years the cadence was 128 and was only changed from 128 to 120 in about 1940 when Infantry Drill Regulations , Field Manual 22–5, was changed and simplified.

I was interested in Timothy Forbes’s editorial “Liberty Alive” (June/July) because I was early associated with American Heritage and have watched its development. I think he has a feel for the magazine.