APRIL 9, 1984— As an old historian of college football, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the sentence on page 58 of the April/May issue in which Professor Kazin reports that Buzz Law of Princeton “kicked a goal from behind his own goalpost.” This would have been more than a hundred yards, at least forty yards longer than anything that Charlie Brickley of Harvard or Pat O’Dea of Wisconsin ever accomplished. I suspect that it ought to have been “punted” from behind his own goalposts.
WHEN A PUBLICATION wants to illustrate the story of Salem witchcraft, it often runs the painting The Trial of George Jacobs for Witchcraft , which hangs in the Essex Institute, Salem’s historical archive. The central figure, an old man with long, white hair, is kneeling before the court, with arms outstretched, asking mercy. A few feet away a girl of sixteen is pointing an accusing finger at him; she is his grand-daughter, Margaret. Behind Margaret a middle-aged woman reaches out to restrain the girl; that is her mother, Rebecca Jacobs, the wife of George, Jr., the old man’s son. In a cluster at one side of the judges’ bench, the hysterical teen-age girls who started all the trouble writhe and scream to demonstrate how the old man is tormenting them. On the bench are the judges who condemned George Jacobs to death by hanging.
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES has been called variously the nation’s memory, storehouse, attic, and soul. The institution is known as the place where Americans can find their roots, as the country’s Hall of Heroes, and, by cynics, as the nation’s wastebasket. All these labels are, in fact, perfectly apt. In the handsome National Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, in the fifteen regional records centers, and in the seven presidential libraries—which altogether make up the National Archives—are stored 3,250,000,000 documents, 5,000,000 still pictures, 91,000,000 feet of motion pictures, and 122,000 sound and video recordings. The range is breathtaking: the most important holdings are the nation’s birth records—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—which, carefully guarded and preserved, are on permanent display; less awesome are such homey exhibits as a handwritten letter from Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain to President Eisenhower, sending him a recipe for “Drop Scones.”
Col. Harry Summers, Jr., presents “The Bitter Triumph of Ia Drang” (February/March 1984) as a “good place to start” for those who “still find the Vietnam War difficult to understand.”
A much better starting place on the trail to understanding is with the American subversion of the Geneva Accords. We didn’t support the 1956 unification elections because we saw a communist, Ho Chi Minh, as the probable winner in the presidential election. A Vietnam under Ho, however, would have posed no more of a security threat to us than Yugoslavia. We need not have killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people and ravaged their land, costing us fiftysix thousand American lives and billions of dollars. It is even likely that, without U.S. intervention, Vietnam would not have become a Soviet client state.
We started to lose the war when we dropped support for those critical Vietnamese elections. It might have been a blunder for the Vietnamese to have elected a communist president, but it would have been their folly.
TO CELEBRATE its fiftieth anniversary, the National Archives has planned a special exhibition, “Recent America,” which opened June 19 and will run through Labor Day, 1985. Hours are 10:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. daily through Labor Day, and 10:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. during the winter months. Movies and lectures will be offered as part of a “kaleidoscopic look” at the period, according to the archivist, Robert M. Warner.
Jacques Barzun instructs us that you don’t know America unless you know baseball. And when I think of suburbs—which I did in reading John R. Stilgoe’s “The Suburbs” (February/March)—I searched for that sine qua non of their history, namely Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was the very first modern American suburb, a niche achieved because the confluence of technology and nature offered easy accessibility to Manhattan. Its boosters took advantage of an innovation in transportation—the steam ferry. Service to Manhattan began in 1814, quickly resulting in the growth of the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. And this was just the beginning.
I was interested in David McCuIlough’s “Letters of a Most Uncommon Common Man” (December 1983). The letters he quoted tell us a lot about our thirty-third president.
But President Truman was not the first to appear on television. President Roosevelt spoke at the opening of the New York World’s Fair on April 30, 1939. Obviously the author meant that President Truman was the first President to address the United States from the White House by television.
Our June/July issue contained a particularly unfortunate typographic error. In his article “The Final Act,” Vance Bourjaily wrote, “Terrorism swept the world, most incredibly in the slaughter of Israeli athletes and Arab commandos at the Munich Olympics.”
Neither the editors of this magazine nor Mr. Bourjaily would suggest that there is any parallel between the killing of the athletes and the death of their murderers. The sentence should have read, “Terrorism swept the world, most incredibly in the slaughter of Israeli athletes by Arab commandos at the Munich Olympics.”
Our apologies to those of our readers who were, rightly, offended by this mistake.
THE CELEBRATION began even before the opening gavel of the First American Woman’s League Convention. As the thousand arriving delegates made their way out Delmar Boulevard to University City, a new suburb of St. Louis, storefronts hung with flags and bunting greeted them. Trolleys, wagons, and even a railroad train made a kind of procession to a camp of gay circus tents, complete with a hospital. The delegates had come for what they believed would be a turning point in the lives of American women.