January 2011

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.

When the historian Richard White wrote his first scholarly article about Indian environmental history in the mid-1970s, he knew he was taking a new approach to an old field, but he did not realize just how new it was. “I sent it to a historical journal,” he reports, “and I never realized the U.S. mail could move so fast. It was back in three days. The editor told me it wasn’t history.”

Times have changed. The history of how American Indians have lived in, used, and altered the environment of North America has emerged as one of the most exciting new fields in historical scholarship. It has changed our understanding not only of American Indians but of the American landscape itself. To learn more about what historians in the field have been discovering, American Heritage asked two of its leading practitioners, Richard White and William Cronon, to meet and talk about their subject.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, a doorbell would ring almost anywhere in America, a housewife would run to answer it, and there would stand a well-groomed, smiling gentleman. “I’m your Fuller Brush Man,” he would say, stepping back deferentially. “And I have a gift for you.” It was the famous Handy Brush. “I’ll just step in a moment,” he would go on, scooping up his sample case and kicking off his rubbers (which were, by intention, bought a size too large so they would slip off easily). By some extrasensory perception, the Fuller representative would seem to know where the living room was, and within seconds his case would be open, the free brush splendidly in view, the demonstration, or “dem,” already under way.

At sunset on August 29, Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife, Narcissa, climbed off their horses in a high pass over Oregon’s Blue Mountains and praised God. Five thousand feet below them lay their destination, the Walla Walla valley. “Enchanting,” wrote Narcissa in her journal later. Five months before, they had set out from Liberty, Missouri, with Rev. Henry Spalding and his wife, Eliza, on their overland journey to Oregon, where the couples intended to work as missionaries among the Indians. Never before had the overland route been attempted by white women, but Narcissa and Eliza demonstrated to those back east who were longing to pioneer that women were equal to the arduous trip. And theirs had been a formidable one.

When the Olympic Games opened in Berlin, Adolf Hitler enthroned himself in the guest of honor’s prominent stand in the track and field stadium. From there he expected to witness his theory of Aryan supremacy confirmed. For the first few events on August 2, Nordic youth did win, and they were duly led to Hitler’s stand, where he shook their hands. But then two Americans, Cornelius Johnson and David Albritton, took first and second places in the high jump. They were both blacks, and, according to Hitler, members of an inferior race. In a sudden commotion, the F’fchrer abruptly left the stadium; no one doubted he did so to avoid honoring the black men. Notified by the Olympic Committee that he must congratulate all or none, Hitler seemingly chose the latter—but continued to congratulate Germans in private, while hoping the Aryans would fare better in the following events.

In the interest of historical accuracy, I’d like to make a small correction to Clarence W. Johnson’s letter in the April/May issue. I believe the railroad involved, the N.C. & St. L., was the Nashville, Chattanooga, & St. Louis Railway, not the North Carolina and St. Louis. Known as The Dixie Line, it was absorbed into the Louisville & Nashville in 1957 and is now part of the Seaboard System.

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One night in 1883 the three-yearold William E. Sidney rollerskated out onto the floor of a Perry, Iowa, rink and proceeded to spin, jump, and swoop with such uncanny fluency that he went on to recoup the family fortune. His granddaughter, Dorothy Sidney Smith of Indianapolis, tells the story:

The man who invented the modern age …

For half his life, Henry Ford was a great man. He developed the means to produce a car every ten seconds and to put it in the hands of farmers and workingmen, and thereby changed the nature of America. Then, having built a great industrial empire, he set about destroying it—and the son who was going to take it over. In a sweeping and richly anecdotal portrait, David Halberstam-traces^the career of Henry Ford from farm boy to titan.

The most dangerous summer …

On the calm, lovely morning of May 10, 1940, Hitler flung his armies forward across Europe. Those invincible legions “were the winged carriers of an astonishing drama,” says the historian John Lukacs, and in a stirring essay he recalls the confusion and high courage of those terrible months: the fall of France; Churchill rising “like a spectral monument out of the historical mist” and, behind Churchill, the massive shadow of Franklin Roosevelt, moving to marshal his nation’s strength against Hitler.