January 2011

Gelette Burgess is best remembered for his ditty about the purple cow, but he also composed a splendid tribute to the cable car. His turn-of-the-century “San Francisco Rhapsody” not only has a fine swing to it, it is accurate too. George W. Hilton, in his definitive book The Cable Car in America , writes of the Hyde Street extension: “The new mileage was a useful addition to the city’s cable network, but it suffered the obvious disadvantages of running at a right angle to the dominant pattern of cables and being the last line built in the city. As a result, it was inferior to every other cable and as … Gelett Burgess correctly points out, had 22 rope drops on every round trip.”

No era provides such revealing insights into the cultural values of both producers and consumers of American advertising as the 1920s and 1930s, when admen not only claimed the status of professionals but also saw themselves as missionaries of modernity.

During the era, advertising came to focus less on the product that was for sale and more on the consumer who would do the buying. (An ad in the Ladies’ Home Journal of the late 1920s assured each reader that “Elizabeth Arden is personally interested in you.”) The scale and tempo of contemporary life left the average citizen anxious, advertisers saw, and they offered their products as palliatives. What made advertising “modern” was the advertisers’ discovery of techniques for both responding to and exploiting the public’s insecurities.

Wall of Separation Grand Thanksgiving On Having Been There On Having Been There Echoes of the Civil War Limits of Medicine Aero Memories

In reply to Mr. Lichtenstein’s comment on my article ‘The Wall of Separation” (August/September 1984), may I say that I can find therein no “downright distortion of fact.” Contrariwise, he is guilty of downright distortion of my text.

I am perfectly aware that the Constitution offers an option to the President-elect to take an oath or affirm. What I pointed out is that most of our Presidents have chosen to do the former. Whether the “tradition” established by our first President is now considered binding is indeed a moot question. But so far thirty-seven out of his thirty-nine successors have chosen to take an oath on the Bible. It so happens that all the successors have been men, but there is nothing in my article to suggest that they “must” be men, as Mr. Lichtenstein implies. The issue of gender is not even discussed in my article.

It is hard for me to describe the thrill I had when I saw your tribute to Dorr E. Felt and his Comptometer in the October/November 1984 “Time Machine.” Mr. Felt was my beloved grandfather. Since the demise of his company through mergers and the takeover of the calculating field by electronics, it had seemed as if no one except the family remembered him or his invention. Many modern historians have given undue credit for the first practical calculator to others, one being the Englishman Charles Babbage, whose attempts at constructing a calculating machine in the 1820s came to naught when the British government refused to give him further support after eight years of failure. Other historians have given credit to William S. Burroughs, whose work and patents followed Mr. Felt’s. I congratulate you on your careful research and for giving due credit to the young runaway farm boy turned machinist who worked with crude tools and materials to prove an idea and to establish an industry.

I find I must take issue with Philip Kunhardt (“I Wish I’d Been There,” December 1984) in his account of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. It is not the “last great old-style infantry charge in history.” That dubious honor, if you can call it that, belongs to Lt. Gen. John B. Hood, who on November 30, 1864, brought his Army of Tennessee to the outskirts of the village of Franklin, Tennessee. He was pursuing Federal forces under Maj. Gen. John Schofield, who had just eluded a trap set for him by Hood at Spring Hill, Tennessee, ten to twelve miles south of Franklin.

Schofield’s forces had arrived in Franklin some hours ahead of the Confederates and had quickly fortified themselves along the Harpeth River just south of Franklin. As Hood’s army began to assemble in front of Franklin, the Southern general divided his forces between the east and west side of the Columbia-Franklin Pike, now U.S. 31, and prepared to attack.

The last time Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz saw his Führer was on April 20, 1945, Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday. The celebration, held in the Führerbunker, a dank catacomb buried deep beneath the Reich chancellery, 20 feet lower than Berlin’s sewer system, was hardly festive.

Like any editor, I have my secret sources of information, personally satisfying but also useful in my professional role. Some of these sources are people, some are books, and a few are periodicals that give me a sense of stability, even buoyancy, in the torrent of words that always seems about to engulf my desk. The most important of these journals for me is the (London) Times Literary Supplement , a weekly newspaper that magisterially reviews every literary and academic subject. By keeping up with the erudite, often witty articles in TLS , one gets an incomparable sense of the best and most current thinking on any particular subject. In this way I have, over the years, been able to work up instant if evanescent expertise on such matters as geomorphology, the Albigensian heresy, and the relationship between Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

“I will sign a statement or affidavit to the effect that I never heard of any game or pastime called Monopoly prior to my own use of the word in this connection,” wrote the self-proclaimed inventor of Monopoly, Charles B. Darrow, to Parker Brothers in April. It must have seemed an evasive way to say that he had created the game itself, but Parker Brothers patented Monopoly in his name anyway and placed it on the market. Sales skyrocketed. Puzzles, paper masks, and games all sold well during the Depression, but Monopoly was ideally suited to the era: getting rich and forcing one’s opponents into bankruptcy is the object of the game. Monopoly granted the unemployed an opportunity to be fiendishly wealthy for hours at a time.

It seems Darrow found in Monopoly a somewhat similar opportunity. Testimony presented at a 1977 trademarkinfringement suit that Parker Brothers successfully filed against a game called Anti-Monopoly revealed why Darrow worded his 1935 letter so carefully:

America is not a nation of readers, yet books have had a deep and lasting effect on its national life. By comparison with the Russians, whose thirst for books—especially contraband books—is legendary, we pay them scant attention; Walker Percy once dolefully estimated that the hard-core audience for serious literature in this country of 230,000,000 is perhaps one or two million, and he probably was not far off. True though that may be, it remains that, had it not been for a number of hugely influential books, this nation might well be an almost unrecognizably different place.