January 2011

Barton J. Bernstein’s “Why We Didn’t Use Poison Gas in World War II” (August/September 1985) was a lucid and enlightening account of the principal factors that led both sides to abstain from the use of chemical and biological warfare.

I was somewhat surprised, however, that he did not mention the practical problems involved in the delivery of chemical and biological agents. I do not profess to be an expert in chemical and biological warfare, but I have talked to people who are, among them my instructors at the Naval Chemical and Biological Warfare School at Fort McClellan, Alabama, which I attended in 1958.

Early in 1952, Dwight David Eisenhower confided to a friendly Republican politician why he was reluctant to seek the Presidency: “I think I pretty well hit my peak in history when I accepted the German surrender.”

Emerging from World War II as the organizer of the Allied victory, Eisenhower was America’s most celebrated hero. Both major political parties sought to nominate him for the presidency. And when Ike decided to risk his historical reputation, he captured the 1952 Republican presidential nomination and ended twenty years of Democratic rule. Ronald Reagan was among the millions of Democrats who crossed party lines to support the Republican general. Afterward, the badly beaten Democratic candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson, asked his friend Alistair Cooke: “Who did I think I was, running against George Washington?”

Although most observers now agree that Elsenhower could be effectively articulate when he wished to be, during the years of his Presidency he was known for the disjointed, wandering quality of his speech. Mimics and parodists had a field day. One of the best such lampoons turned out to be by American Heritage’s former editor Oliver Jensen. It was first printed anonymously in the New Republic in June 1957. Since then, it has been widely reprinted with its proper by-line.

Never at an art exhibition in this city has there been such an attendance,” the young painter Guy Pène du Bois reported in the New York American for February 4, 1908, adding that “only with the greatest difficulty, by stretching of necks, crowding and other strenuous methods, were spectators enabled to see the paintings.” All that week and the next, despite a snowstorm followed by days of slush, the curious continued to crowd into the Macbeth Galleries’ two 16 x 20 foot rooms on an upstairs floor of 450 Fifth Avenue. There they found eight one-man shows of unconventional pictures. This arrangement didn’t please everybody. One critic was “appalled by the clashing dissonances, by the jangling and booming of eight differently tuned orchestras,” while others testified that “vulgarity smites one in the face at this exhibition” and that “the whole thing creates a distinct feeling of nausea.” Yet several writers for newspapers and magazines praised the show; one critic, notably, hailed the exhibition of “so excellent a group,” whose paintings “escaped the blight of imitation.”

Senior Editor Carla Davidson knows more than anyone else on the premises about the history of how this magazine finds and uses illustrations. The other day I asked her to tell me about it:

“The founders learned the basic elements of putting together an exciting picture story during their early days at Time, Inc. In addition, Oliver Jensen, Joe Thorndike, and Joan Kerr all had an abiding interest in American imagery. We have always been alert to the private collections and to recent discoveries that make us feel we are really doing research , not simply picking up a picture from another book or grabbing the first available portrait of Abraham Lincoln. We work in depth and we continue to mine American pictorial treasures to ever greater depths.

How we got Texas

I have long since been aware,” Andrew Jackson was writing as early as 1829, “of the importance of Texas to the United States.” And indeed the old warrior’s last years were consumed with the desire to have Texas in the Union. On the sesquicentennial of the territory’s violent split with Mexico, Robert V. Remini traces the course of the complex and absorbing diplomacy that led Texas into the federal fold. Remini’s story is followed by a portfolio of little-known photographs that bring the Texas story forward from statehood into the twentieth century; and William Broyles, a native son, tells us what we’re looking at.

America’s finest cars

The automobile authority Brock Yates surveys the years when our car companies turned out machines that even rich Germans wanted to own, and picks the all-time greatest. The names of some still have the power to stir the blood; others—like the 1955 Chevy Bel Air—may come as a surprise.

When I was a small boy, about equally obsessed with drawing, history, and comic books, I had a favorite artist. His name was Joe Maneely (I hope I’ve spelled that right; it’s been a while since I scanned the big rack of comic books in Wolf’s toy store on Chicago’s South Side seeking his bravura signature), and his stock-in-trade was historical accuracy. He did Westerns, for the most part, and his knowledge of 19th-century artifacts struck me as encyclopedic; his rumpled, unshaven cowboys all wore the right hats, swung the right lariats, sat in the right saddles, fired the right model Colts, with every screwhead and trigger guard and notched handle precisely rendered. Because of this, everything about his comics seemed to me superior to those which my friends favored, filled with the adventures of Saturday-afternoon-serial cowboys in embroidered shirts and 20-gallon hats. But for all their authenticity of setting and detail, even Maneely’s comics finally began to seem the same to me; the stories became predictable; the protagonists turned out to be as flat and unsubtle as the colors in which they were printed. I got older and turned to books.

Men and women really do live in different worlds,” says Eliza G. C. Collins, a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review, in a recently published book entitled “Dearest Amanda … ”: An Executive’s Advice to Her Daughter. To my dismay and despite my considerable skepticism, Ms. Collins’ book led me to suspect that those worlds differ more painfully than I had ever imagined.

Shortly before the Republicans convened in Philadelphia in 1872 to renominate Ulysses S. Grant for president, Susan Brownell Anthony visited him at the White House. She told Mr. Grant that her National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) wanted him to make votes for women a plank in his platform. Grant replied that he had “already done more for women than any other president.” He recognized the “right of women to be postmasters,” he said, and had named 5000 to the post, but he would make no promises about the party platform.

Anthony had never been comfortable playing the role of supplicant. The NWSA’s mottoes avoided any pleading tone: “Men—their rights and nothing more. Women—their rights and nothing less”; “Principle, not Policy. Justice, not favors.” But the suffragists believed that Republicans were their best bet in the upcoming election; Henry Wilson, who was to be Grant’s vice-presidential running mate, was less equivocal about women’s suffrage than Grant, while Horace Greeley, the probable Democratic candidate, was outspokenly against it.

Surprisingly little is known about the posters shown on these pages. Springing up practically overnight in the mid-1920s, they bloomed for a short while, four or five years at most, and then their season, was over. Who was behind them and the reason for their demise is mostly a matter of conjecture. But one thing is certain: they rank with the best commercial art ever produced in this country, distinguished by their simple, vigorous shapes, subtle colors, and bold typography. Their wit and good humor is captivating, as is the air of romance that suffuses their intrinsically practical purpose—to promote the pleasures of traveling on Chicago’s public transport system.