January 2011

Frank Hamer, a former Texas Ranger, got a tip that the bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker would be coming down a road near Arcadia, Louisiana. Hamer had been after them for six months. On May 23 he set up an ambush, on top of a little hill, with a handful of fellow lawmen. Among them was R. F. Alcorn, who knew the pair by sight. “That’s them, boys,” Alcorn said as the car approached. They shouted for Barrow to halt, but he and Parker went for their guns; the posse produced a lethal fusillade, and fifty bullets hit the bank robbers. Bonnie Parker was found with a machine gun in her lap, Barrow with a sawed-off shotgun in his hand. There were two more machine guns, another shotgun, six automatic pistols, and a revolver in the car. Among Bonnie Parker’s effects was a poem she had written:

Congratulations on your December issue! For obvious reasons, I was particularly interested in the section “A Hollywood Retrospective.” Kevin Brownlow’s report on the very early days was extremely good and, so far as I can tell, from 1916 onward, absolutely correct in all details.

However, the article relating to Warner Brothers, although excellent, does leave an impression that most of the films made during the early 1930s were of the hard-hitting, tough, gangster type.

This, however, is only partially true. I was under contract to them at the time. Certainly the tough (or “frontpage”) type of film was a Warner Brothers specialty, but it must be remembered that the company also produced more conventional comedies and dramas, all the John Barrymore, George Arliss, Richard Barthelmess, Bette Davis, Kay Francis pictures and so on.

BECAUSE THE Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, I found myself soon after flying down with a technical mission to the province of El Oro in Ecuador, a province I had never before heard of, in a land of which I knew nothing, except that it straddled the equator, for which it was named.

In a remote way we were deemed to be part of the war effort. We carried with us a program for helping to forestall a Japanese invasion of South America and other possible Axis moves by teaching the nationals (never natives , that hangover from the era of imperialism) to grow tomatoes, improving the bloodlines of their livestock, instituting a public health program, and providing running water.

In the absence of any Allied victories for most of 1942, our duty was to give an impression of benevolence, technological know-how, and efficiency.

In “The Time Machine” in your December issue, you indicate that George Washington said farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern on “Friday, the fourth” of December 1783. This must have required some doing, since up here in Connecticut December 4, 1783, was a Thursday.

WHETHER FLOWERS ARE a worthy subject for the painter—a question hat seems almost medieval in its distance from current art theory—was once the concern of the most eminent artists and critics. In the eighteenth century the British artist Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced that still-life painting of any kind was a “lower exercise,” offering no elevating moral lessons. Furthermore, he said, no mature artist should waste his brushwork on that subdivision of the still-life genre—flower painting.

But only fifty years later the critic John Ruskin held that flowers were a most appropriate and neglected subject. He felt that painters shied away from it not because the subject was trivial but because it was too hard. And much as he favored floral subjects, his discouraging opinion was that the beauty of flowers was “wholly inimitable and their sweetest service unrenderable by art.”

DURING THE FIRST three years of World War II, five million women covered their hair, put on “slacks,” and at the government’s urging went to work in defense plants. They did every kind of job, but the largest single need was for riveters. In song, story, and film, the female patriot, “Rosie the Riveter,” was born. Many of the new recruits had worked in service trades—as maids, cooks, or waitresses. Many more had never worked at any paying job. Practically none of them had ever made as much money. How they felt about resentful male co-workers, race and sex prejudice, and their own new self confidence is revealed in these interviews with ex-defense workers.

WINONA ESPINOSA: RIVETER AND BUS DRIVER

Getting, spending, and lending…

Now, when all the rules have changed, Martin Mayer, the author of Madison Avenue, USA and Wall Street , reviews the two hundred years of American banking that led to the cash machine.

Scott and Ernest…

The literary historian Alfred Kazin shows how Hemingway and Fitzgerald helped define what it meant to be American in the first half of this century.

How to post your wife …

To “post” one’s wife meant to publish a formal notice in a newspaper of her shortcomings. Discontented husbands in the eighteenth century did this with great abandon; but the wives caught on soon enough and began to post right back.

Truman and MacArthur…

The story of Tarawa revisited by G. D. Lillibridge (October/November 1983) was beautifully written and touched me deeply. I know only one person who was killed during the war. There were others from our small town, of course, but they were just names without faces. My contemporaries and I spent the World War II years in the classroom.

Charlie had worked for my father until he joined the Marines in 1942. On the same autumn day that my father learned of Charlie’s death—killed by our own guns on Saipan—he received a letter from him dated a few weeks earlier. It was brief, as were all his letters, saying only to save his job for him. He’d be back as soon as the war ended because “if I managed to live through Tarawa I know I can survive anything.”

As one who began reading A MERICAN H ERITAGE in 1947 and who served on the advisory board from 1949 to 1977, I have read a goodly number of issues with considerable care. There has never been one with so much good writing as October/November 1983. Though I am not much of a fan for military writing, Cawthon’s piece is masterly. And any day one runs into Marshall Davidson in person or in print is a holiday.