January 2011

“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.

Two years younger than Jasper Cropsey and Sanford Gifford and one year older than Frederic Edwin Church, George Inness was the contemporary of a group of American landscape painters closely joined by shared styles and ideals in the tradition of Thomas Cole. They were America’s most admired artists in the decade or so that preceded the Civil War; in 1859, Church’s Heart of the Andes drew the highest price ever paid for a contemporary American landscape. These artists traveled widely in Europe, the Near East, South America, and even the Arctic, but they were so closely associated with the Hudson River valley that they came to be called the Hudson River school.

Joseph Pulitzer, nearly blind, suffering from bouts of depression, and so sensitive to sound he exploded when the silverware was rattled, managed his newspapers in absentia for the last twenty years of his life. Nearly every day, he received memos from the New York World office providing him with the information he required: financial reports, circulation figures, summaries of lead stories and features, lists of headlines in the World and its rivals, office gossip, and evaluations of key personnel.

Editor's Note: Harry G. Brown of Lockport, New York, writes us: “As a student of history, I thoroughly enjoyed ‘I Wish I’d Been There,’ featured in the thirtieth-anniversary issue (December 1984). While the comments of each contributor about a significant event were enlightening and interesting, I wondered what might be the reaction of the common man who happened to be present at such a time. That well-known humorist Robert Benchley captured the situation perfectly in a brief essay; fortunately, it was illustrated by Gluyas Williams, who also was featured in the same issue of American Heritage. Therefore, I urge you to secure permission to reprint this brief article for the delight of your readers.” And we did just that.

Arms and the press …

To Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, journalists were a “set of dirty … scribblers who have the impudence of Satan.” A hundred and twenty years later, during the invasion of Grenada, the U.S. military felt it had found the solution to newspaper meddling: it simply left the press behind. But the public outcry that followed raised all the old issues, and we examine them. Stephen W. Sears traces the growing enmity between newsmen and the military during the Civil War; Joseph H. Cooper unearths a historical alternative to the present vogue of generals suing the press; and the veteran reporter John Chancellor, looking back to World War II, speculates on why the military trusted correspondents so much more at a time when the stakes were really high.

The greatest American sculptor…

Evan S. Connell’s best-known novel, Mrs. Bridge, published in 1959, is a portrait of a Midwestern wife and mother of the 1940s whose complacent certitudes inexorably isolate her - first from her own children, then from the increasingly uncertain world beyond her tidy Kansas City neighborhood. Toward the end of the book, her son and daughters gone, her husband dead, Mrs. Bridge finds some solace in a family album containing snapshots of the single European trip she and the late Mr. Bridge had managed to take:

A letter written by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1818 is my second-favorite business letter. Vanderbilt was then 24, and he wrote to his employer, Thomas Gibbons, the owner of a ferry that ran between New Brunswick and New York City, about a competitor named Letson. Vanderbilt at that time captained the ferryboat Bellona, and his wife, Sophia, added to the family’s income by running a popular riverside hotel, Bellona Hall, in New Brunswick.

The letter reads: “Last evening, New Brunswick wais in an uproar. Letson toald the passengers that retaining them their was all my fait that all I did it for was to get their supper and lodging from them he offered to take 7 of them for 3 dollars each in one of the Line Stages the bargain wais maid and upon reflection Letson flew. Cannot you stop Letsons mouth?”

1835 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1860 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago 1885 One Hundred Years Ago 1935 Fifty Years Ago