January 2011

Every American knows that the word jalopy means an elderly, decrepit automobile. Though the word undoubtedly originated in the United States, it is now common in all English-speaking countries and occasionally is used in some other parts of the world.

The earliest known appearance of the word jalopy in print, in a book published in Chicago in 1929, spelled it jaloppi . Nowadays, though dictionaries show different acceptable spellings, the most common is jalopy , even though this is somewhat undesirable in that it makes it appear that the word might rhyme with “soapy” or “dopey.” Instead, of course, jalopy rhymes with “copy” or “poppy.”

Presidential images do change, and Dwight Elsenhower’s new image may be partly justified, but is the euphoria shown in “Why We Were Right to Like Ike” really warranted? Neal correctly mentions the matter of bias in presidential evaluation; but he seems particularly outraged that some partisan Democratic scholars, who had actually written speeches for Adlai Stevenson, participated in the 1962 Schlesinger poll. Since we are all biased to some extent, we should tread softly in accusing others of bias. Perhaps not surprisingly the Republican Chicago Tribune poll of 1982 (did columnist Neal conduct it?), with a different cast of academics (perhaps more Republicans, and a strange mix of Cold Warriors and Cold War revisionists), moved Elsenhower up from twenty-second to ninth on the list of presidential greats.

Steve Neal replies: In evaluating presidential performance, it’s often a matter of perspective. Harry Truman, for example, might have had more trouble getting a favorable rating from a panel of scholars that included some of the speech writers of his 1948 political opponents, Thomas Dewey and Henry Wallace. My premise that the 1962 Schlesinger poll was somewhat distorted because of the participation of Stevenson’s political associates has been reinforced by subsequent polls of historians and political scholars that have rated Elsenhower much differently.

The life and times of U.S. weather…

At last, a historical perspective on the one subject that everybody talks about at least once every day. “The weather,” said Mark Twain, “is always doing something … always getting up new designs and trying them on people to see how they will go.” In the June/July issue, we reveal how wind, rain, calms, and turbulences have worked those designs on Americans over the years. The prominent weather historian David M. Ludlum surveys our climate
from the time of Cotton Mather (who brought the same heroic obsessiveness to his weather observations that he did to everything else) to the latest hardware scanning the atmosphere from space. And William B. Meyer will trace the course of our long battle to control the weather, from modest efforts like sending up dynamite kites to such epic measures as blocking the strait between Newfoundland and America.

Enlisted for life…

The self-taught artist Ammi Phillips had been earning his living painting portraits for twenty-five years by the time young James Mairs Salisbury sat for him in 1836 (left), and this canvas reveals how well he had learned to disguise his shortcomings as a draftsman. He used the same composition—plain background, patterned floor, brass-tacked bench, brown and white dog—over and over again; he concealed the body in an elaborate costume that was neverthless easy to paint; and he took care of the hands by having them hold a strawberry. All of this left him more time to concentrate on the boy’s face, with which his clients were no doubt well pleased.

Winslow Homer painted the Old Drover’s Inn in 1887 (left), a few years after he and his family moved to Prout’s Neck, Maine. The pastoral subject matter is exceptional among Homer’s work there—most of his scenes were of the sea and fishermen. In the end, it’s the cows, not the house, that make this watercolor a triumph; few artists are able to impart animation to such stolid animals. Cows were a banal fact of life in Homer’s America, but he saw their beauty.

Walter Gay’s Interior , painted about 1900 (opposite), is inscribed to the Comtesse de Fitz-James and probably shows a room in her house in Paris. Gay, born in Massachusetts, spent virtually all his adult life in France, painting interiors empty of people, in his words, “giving personality to objects and furniture.”

Twenty years ago, Alain C. Enthoven was one of America’s most controversial intellectuals in the field of military affairs. He had gone to the Pentagon in 1961 to act as a civilian adviser to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. By training, he was an economist, with degrees from Stanford (1952), Oxford (1954), and MIT (1956). From 1956 to 1960, he worked at the RAND Corporation, doing contract research for the Air Force.

Enthoven and the other young advisers who joined the Department of Defense at the beginning of the Kennedy administration were derisively called the Whiz Kids. They tried to apply statistical analysis to problems that had traditionally been resolved by a mixture of intuitive reasoning, inter-service log-rolling, and congressional politics.

This perfect midsummer scene, with its dark, glossy trees and sunny lawn (left), is the product of a Scottish-born painter named John Williamson, who began his career in the 1840s decorating window shades. Williamson spent most of his life in Brooklyn, but he traveled all over the Northeast, and the majority of his pictures are rural scenes of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. He was particularly fond of the Hudson River, and it was from an estate overlooking the Tappan Zee that he made this fresh and oddly modern-looking painting in 1875.