January 2011

Eric Foner’s revision of the history of Reconstruction in the South in the October/November 1983 issue is not a new view but only a return to the position historians took for a number of years after the Civil War.

I cannot believe Reconstruction was anything but a mistake. It was understandable but still unfortunate. One must hate in order to kill, and therefore war causes hatred. A person’s emotions are not taken off at the conclusion of war like a football player takes off his uniform at the conclusion of the game.

I do not agree that Lincoln had no policy as to how he would handle Reconstruction. He expressed a policy that contemplated normal government, certainly not the creation of military districts with martial law lasting eleven years in some states. The bullet that killed Lincoln and put Thaddeus Stevens in charge was the most tragic fired in all American history.

THE SUCCESS OF John and Charles Wesley in founding Methodism is well documented, but what is seldom mentioned is that they started their ecclesiastical careers with a period of unrelieved bungling. It all took place in colonial Georgia in the early eighteenth century when the Wesley brothers, as the colony’s founder, Gen. James Oglethorpe, said, attempted to “unroll their rolled-up rules for England” in this struggling young settlement. John and Charles’s adventure, Oglethorpe concluded disgustedly, should be made “a play or tale of.”

One of the last photographs of Hemingway shows him wandering a road in Idaho and kicking a can. It is an overcast day, and he is surrounded by snow-swept mountains. He looks morose, is evidently in his now usual state of exasperation, and he is all alone. The emptiness of Idaho is the only other presence in the picture.

With his gift for locating the most symbolic place for himself, Hemingway was bound to end up in Idaho. And this was not just for the hunting and fishing. At every stage of his life he found a frontier for himself appropriate to his needs as a sportsman and his ceremonial needs as a writer.

BY ITS VERY NATURE a magazine speaks for itself, but we don’t think it is only professional editors who are fascinated by the way a magazine comes together. Here’s how some major pieces in this particular issue happened:

Ed Sorel’s “Lost Pleasures” is a labor of love by the preeminent satirical illustrator of our time. Struck by the disappearance of some of the most common and satisfying customs of the recent past, Sorel and our staff exchanged ideas about those that would best suit themselves to commemoration. For a full year we exchanged reminiscences about such lost pleasures as luxurious passenger-train service, doctors who regularly made house calls, taxicabs a human being could sit up in. Between more lucrative commercial assignments, Sorel would, from time to time, drop off a new drawing. He still feels we didn’t pay him enough, but after all, someone must encourage art for its own sake.

ONE OF THE WORLD’S most renowned architectural institutions is named for a virtually unknown architect who died at age thirty-eight, too young to have made more than a promising start in his own career. In 1890, the year of Henry Ogden Avery’s death, his parents founded the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York City and donated two thousand books from their son’s professional library as well as the drawings from his brief career.

The Old Class of Mine Reconstruction Hollywood Witness One Day’s Difference One Day’s Difference

Augoft 2d. 1771.

Whereas Hannah, wife

makes it her steady business to pass from house to house, with her buisey news, in tattling and bawling andlying, and carrying out things out of my house, things contrary to my knowledge— these are therefore to forbid all persons of having any trade or commerce with the said Hannah.

Richard Smith (legal notice appearing in The Connecticut Courant , August 6, 1771)

After you is good Manners for me !

Whereas Richard Smith

AT 1:00 A.M. ON THE morning of April 11, 1951, a tense band of Washington reporters filed into the White House newsroom for an emergency press conference. Hastily summoned by the White House switchboard, they had no idea of what was to come. The Truman administration, detested by millions, had grown hesitant, timid, and unpredictable. The Korean War, so boldly begun ten months before, had degenerated into a “limited war” with no discernible limit, a bloody stalemate. Some reporters, guessing, thought they were going to hear about a declaration of war, that the administration was ready to carry the fighting into China and bring it to a swift and victorious end. That was what Gen. Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of U.S. and United Nations forces in the Far East, had passionately been urging for months, ever since Chinese communist troops had sent his armies reeling in retreat from the YaIu River.

For the last several years congressional committees and presidential task forces have been nattering back and forth about what should be done to change the legal order that establishes and specifically empowers and regulates the nation’s banks. They have dealt with their subject as a collection of technical problems they could solve: a bit of oil here, a tightened bolt there, a replacement for a blown gasket—and the old machine will be as good as new. But, in fact, our banking problems are systemic: we need a new machine. Changes in the technology of data processing have made it easy for businesses that are not banks to perform the functions that—until recently—only banks could even attempt, let alone fulfill. And changes in the cost and speed of communications have demolished the barriers that once gave a decidedly local character to the money and credit Americans used in their getting and spending. A uniquely American institution is changing—not only on its face but also in its very innards; a significant factor in our history has come to the end of its time.