Remembering the Alamo Why I Changed My Mind about the Sacco-Vanzetti Case
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January 2011
On the evening of May 4, two to three thousand workers gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest the killing of two strikers by police at the McCormick Reaper plant the day before. Despite their anger, they didn’t become violent but listened peacefully to three speakers who urged them to continue their fight for socialism and an eight-hour day. Pacing through the crowd was Chicago’s mayor, Carter Harrison, who decided the meeting was no cause for worry and went home to bed. So, too, when it began to rain, did all of the women and children and most of the men, until all that remained was a cluster of two to three hundred. The last speaker, Samuel Fielden, a former Methodist minister, was just concluding his remarks.
In “Getting to Know Us” (February/March 1986), the Chinese historian Wenhui Hou mentions using as her American history text An Abridged History of the United States by Huang Shaoxiang, whom she identifies as China’s leading authority on American history. Perhaps it was a problem in translation, but your article had Professor Huang’s gender wrong She had been a guest at our schoo while collecting materials at the National Archives for a revised edition of her History of Early Development of America . A graduate student at Columbia University in the 1940s, Professor Huang was a pioneer in the study of American history in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution for her devotion to forbidden scholarship, she persevered and, in the more open environment of Deng Xiaoping’s China, became the first president of the American History Research Association of China. I enclose a photograph of this dedicated and courageous scholar taken recently at Monticello.
Brock Yates’s article (February/March 1986) on the ten greatest American cars was so interesting that I find it difficult to choose which of his selections—the Stutz or perhaps the Chevrolet—to delete in order to insert the superb make he overlooked.
The Franklin, manufactured in Syracuse, New York, was the foremost example of air-cooled automotive motors. In addition, its four full-elliptic springs allowed it to reign supreme in its incredible ability to maintain speed over the usually very rough, unpaved roadways typical of its time.
A carefully crafted luxury car, it culminated in a magnificent V-12 that sunk in the depths of the Depression.
I must point out one glaring omission from Brock Yates’s list. If not the “greatest automobile of all time,” certainly the crowning automotive achievement of its time and a uniquely American work of engineering is the Doble (preferably series E) of the late 1920s.
It was (and still is, for most of them survive to this day) quieter than a RollsRoyce, would outrun a Duesenberg, required no gearshifting, and could in its day be run for less than any other remotely comparable car. The Doble was warranted for one hundred thousand miles. It would run quite happily on kerosene, heating oil, or other unrationed fuels during World War II, which kept it in daily use when Duesenbergs were being scrapped.
Brock Yates showed real courage in picking out ten of this country’s greatest automobiles. However, he also showed a real lack of knowledge by implying that the U.S. auto industry has suffered from a loss of creativity since the Great Depression. Is Mr. Yates unaware of the Lincoln Continental and its prestigious history? This automobile was displayed by the Museum of Modern Art as an example of artistic excellence and was proclaimed by Frank Lloyd Wright to be the most beautiful car ever designed. Please tell Mr. Yates that, for those of us living in the second half of the twentieth century, creativity in designing cars did not disappear with the running board.
I dived into my first issue of American Heritage upon its arrival. I had ordered the subscription, hoping that it would stimulate my fourteen-year-old daughter’s fledgling interest in social history. I knew I would read every word, and your magazine lives up to all my expectations.
In 1646 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Mary Martin was pregnant and unmarried. Her paramour was a married man, but it was her status as a single woman that determined the nature of her crime. She faced punishment, if her misdeed was discovered, only for fornication; had she been married, her crime would have been adultery, punishable by death.
On April 12 the shelling at Fort Sumter began and, with it, the Civil War. The fort had been very much in the public mind since President Lincoln’s inaugural address a month earlier. He had declared that he would “hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the Government,” and everyone knew he was referring to that besieged island stronghold off Charleston, South Carolina. By refusing to abandon Federal forts located in Confederate states, Lincoln was telling the five-month-old Confederacy that he did not recognize it as a legitimate independent government. Furthermore, his wording implied that the North refused to take the first step toward war; if hostilities were to break out, the South would be the aggressor.
But out on the sandbar where Fort Sumter stood, Maj. Robert Anderson and his force of eighty men had taken stock of their dwindling food supplies and sent word to Washington that they couldn’t hold out much longer. If they weren’t soon resupplied, they would have to abandon the fort.