January 2011

The item in “The Time Machine” of your February/March issue about the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire stirred vivid, long-submerged memories. Fortunately no members of my family were victims of that tragic event, but my grandfather, Dr. George M. Price, who had come here from Russia in the 188Os, was directly involved in the immediate and long-term consequences. It must have been well before my teens when my mother first told me about the fire, the young girls trapped by the sealed exits and jumping to their deaths. She went on to describe my grandfather’s work with the state Factory Investigation Commission, where he helped determine the causes of the fire and its aftermath, and studied how to prevent them from recurring. Later, in my second-term high school English course, we were asked to play reporter, interviewing a family member. I chose my grandfather, who filled in details about the crowded aisles and overflowing bins mentioned in your article.

When I was a boy in Atlanta in the early twenties, my school, Marist College (grades six through twelve), taught history as Charles Eliot Norton and Byron Dobell (“Letter from the Editor,” February/March issue) would have it taught. We learned—interminably—about Atlanta, with major emphasis on the Civil War battles, ours being a military school. We used to collect Minié balls from the battlefield, which included my backyard; then proceeded slowly to Fulton and De Kalb counties, then Georgia; next the Confederacy; finally, shortly before graduation, the rest of the United States, North America, Europe, and remaining continents. Hope Mr. Dobell is reassured.

Byron Dobell’s remarks about the importance of local history bring to mind a professor I had at Columbia University in the 1920s. I cannot remember his name, but he had the same idea. He went so far as to say that the history of the United States was the accumulated total of all the local histories; he made it very II clear to his class that local history was of the greatest importance.

I was so impressed that 1 wrote my term paper on the history of my home county before 1860. The first settlers did not come into that county in the wilds of northern Pennsylvania until about 1800, but 1 found a bunch of material, enough to fill a lot of pages.

Like any automobile buff, Brock Yates is entitled to his opinions concerning the ten greatest American automobiles (February/March issue). That he selected the Cord and Packard pleases me, since 1 once owned a 1933 Packard Super Eight Club Sedan and still own a 1936 Cord 810 Beverly.

However, Mr. Yates errs in at least two cases. The Packard Motor Car Company survived the Great Depression because the company started producing lowerpriced cars in 1935, in addition to their slow-selling luxury line of cars. Had the company not made the decision to pro- duce less expensive cars, it would have met the same fate as Fierce-Arrow, Stutz, Franklin, and the other legendary classic automobile manufacturers.

But ironically the decision to manufacture lower-priced cars eventually contributed to Packard’s demise. When just about anyone who wished to own a Packard could do so, the marque lost much of its mystique as America’s près- tige luxury automobile.

We marked the 150th anniversary of the Texas Revolution with two articles in our February issue. Since then we have learned that San Antonio’s Witte Museum plans to celebrate the occasion with an exhibit running through mid-August that includes a king’s ransom of kitsch generated by the Alamo. The agglomeration of silver spoons and chocolate bars, ashtrays and coonskin caps is colorful, sometimes bizarre—and surprisingly revealing about how Americans have regarded the preeminent Texas shrine. Here, the exhibition’s curator tells us about it.
     --The Editors

Twice during the last twenty-eight years, Francis Russell has written about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for American Heritage. His first article, in October 1958, sought to prove the innocence of the two men. His second story, in June 1962, was written when he had come to believe that one of them was guilty. A new book of his, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved, has recently been published by Harper & Row.

If in 1953 I had not been drawn for a month’s jury duty in Dedham, where Sacco and Vanzetti were tried in 1921, I doubt if I should ever have written about them. That granite building with its austere columns still seemed haunted by the two dead anarchists. The sheriff, in his blue serge cutaway with its embossed brass buttons and his white staff of office, had been the, sheriff at the great trial, and sometimes in the over-long lunch hours I would talk with him about it, or rather listen to him. My interest in the case began during that month. I determined then to read the transcript of the trial.

1636 Three Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1886 One Hundred Years Ago 1936 Fifty Years Ago

On a fine summer day in 1636, Roger Williams and a handful of followers paddled down the Seekonk River, pulled ashore where a fresh spring surfaced at the foot of a high hill, and declared the site their new home. Williams named it Providence, in gratitude for the “freedom and vacancy of this … place and many other providences of the most holy and only wise.”

Williams had much to be thankful for. Five years earlier he had arrived in Puritan New England and found a society as rigid and intolerant as the one he’d left behind in England. Church and state were indistinguishable, and religious life was strictly controlled. Williams became an outspoken critic of what he saw, but not because he held dear some secular notion of liberty. This “divinely mad” man, as a contemporary called him, was guided by his religious beliefs to the conclusion that only in a free society can sinful men and women undertake the spiritual pilgrimage.

We are getting close to the Statue of Liberty’s one hundredth anniversary, and I read your piece on the Statue of Liberty back in June/July 1984, so when I ran across these comments of Mark Twain’s about the building of the statue, I thought you and your readers might like to see them.

As published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch for December 14, 1883, Twain, obviously in response to some fundraising appeal, wrote an article entitled “Why a Statue of Liberty When We Have Adam?” which said in part: