George Hadfield was one of the most distinguished architects ever to practice in this country, yet he is so little known that no book has been written about him and very little has been published in architectural journals. Born in Florence in 1763, the son of an English innkeeper, he arrived in America in 1795 and made Washington his home for the remaining thirty-one years of his life. Among other buildings he designed is Arlington House, now a museum overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. He also contributed substantially to one of the finest complexes of buildings ever erected in the capital: the first offices of the Departments of State, Treasury, Navy, and War, four separate edifices connected with the White House so that they seemed wings of the presidential mansion. Like so many of Hadfield’s Washington buildings, they have disappeared. But his most important achievement still remains: the old City Hall, which inspired its much larger neighbor, the original National Gallery of Art, dedicated in 1941.
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Alain Enthoven replies: Colonel Carter got it wrong.
1. Experience showed the decision to cancel the F-105 and buy the F-4 was a very good one. The F-105 was designed primarily for nuclear-weapons delivery, because in the 1950s the Air Force leaders thought all wars would be nuclear. The F-4 was more powerful, rugged, and, with two engines, much safer for pilots. The official Air Force had to fight to save its F-105, but plenty of Air Force pilots privately confirmed the results of our analysis that the Navy/Marine Corps F-4 was a better all-around fighter for nonnuclear war.
2. “Controlled response” was a doctrine we developed for the conduct of nuclear war in opposition to the previous “uncontrolled spasm response” doctrine. Every President since Kennedy has supported some version of that basic idea.
Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
When Margaret Woodbury Strong died in her sleep on July 17, 1969, the demise of the 72-year-old widow did not go unnoticed in Rochester, New York. For one thing, Mrs. Strong was one of Rochester’s richest inhabitants. She also wore sneakers and dressed, people said, “like a charwoman.” Most of all, Mrs. Strong was a notoriously avid collector of objects that few people collect at all—massproduced paperweights, decorated doorknobs, glass toothpick holders, old inkwells, buttons, plaster figurines, cheap tinplate toys, and honeymoon souvenirs from Niagara Falls. Mrs. Strong loved mass-produced nineteenth-century playthings and gewgaws with a passion commonly reserved for the rare and the beautiful. By 1969, she had not only filled 25 rooms of her 30-room mansion with her eccentric collection, she had disfigured its architecture by adding two concrete blocks to each end of it in order to provide more space for what she called her museum of fascinations.
A person used to enter New York City “like a god,” said the art critic Vincent Scully, but “one scuttles in now like a rat.”
The rathole is Pennsylvania Station, a dispiriting warren built beneath Madison Square Garden, which, in turn, occupies the place of the real Penn Station. That was the monumental gateway designed by Charles Folien McKim in the early years of the century when the railroad was at the zenith of its power and influence on this continent. Alexander Cassatt, president of the mighty Pennsylvania, was determined to tunnel beneath the Hudson River to bring passengers into the heart of Manhattan, and he wanted a station worthy of the achievement.
An immense building that wedded the Baths of Caracalla with a soaring steel-and-glass concourse, the station was a destination satisfactory to the vainest of the demigods who entered it: Presidents and movie stars, dukes and duchesses.
Edward Delano arrived at Macao off the South China coast aboard the American vessel Oneida on December 7, 1840. His initial impression of the tiny Portuguese colony was reassuring. A crescent of handsome whitewashed houses with a half-dozen church spires scattered among them, clinging to a green hillside, it reminded Massachusetts boys like Ned of the fishing village of Nahant.
It had been a long, uneasy journey of 160 days. Ned was just 22 and prone to seasickness. He had never before been more than one hundred miles from the family home at Fairhaven, near New Bedford, and he had not seen his older brother, Warren Delano II, since Warren had sailed for China seven years before. Now Warren was the head of Russell & Company, the biggest American firm in the China trade, and had sent for Ned to join him as a clerk.
Last year 74 percent of our readers resubscribed to American Heritage. Such a phenomenal renewal rate justifies our feeling that the audience for this magazine consists not merely of customers but of friends. Our readers frequently tell us that they and their families and neighbors consider themselves part of a community (Standard English) or network (New Style), all sharing an appetite for the story of how Americans came to be where and what and how they are. It is a taste that enhances their lives by helping them to make sense of the seeming chaos of this fast-forward century.
Readers of American Heritage turn to history in the same way that the directors of television sports programs turn to the replay mode: it lets you take it all in again, the better … to take it all in.
It’s probably always a mistake to think of decades in clichés: the 90s weren’t especially gay; for most people, the 20s didn’t roar much. And I suppose the 50s were nowhere near so bland as they once appeared to us, looking back from the 60s.
Still, things did seem pretty calm then. I spent most of the early 50s as a teenager in Hyde Park, a pleasant, shady, largely white neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side that, then as now, huddled in the shadow of the Gothic citadel that is the University of Chicago campus. Hyde Park’s boundaries were Lake Michigan to the east; the Midway to the South, a grassy, treeless, noman’s-land left behind when swamps were drained to make way for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; and on the west, a wide, busy street called Cottage Grove. We knew very little about the black Chicagoans who lived on the shady streets, only slightly shabbier than ours, that stretched for miles beyond Hyde Park’s inland boundaries.
It was thought best that we stay close to home.
At the first meeting of my first class in business school, our instructor divided the class into groups and gave each group a project. “Most of you are going to spend the rest of your lives trying to get things done in or through groups,” he told us, “so you might as well start now.”
A couple of miles from my classroom, and almost two hundred years earlier, a convention of 55 men had spent an arduous summer working on one of the most formidable group projects in history—the drafting of the Constitution of the United States.
There were many gifted men among those gathered in Philadelphia in 1787. Yet it is unlikely that any of them knew as much about getting things done in and through groups as an ailing, eighty-one-year-old retired businessman who attended the convention as a representative of Pennsylvania.