You state in the August/September 1983 “Time Machine” column that Cyrus Field “radioed” his success from Newfoundland on August 5, 1858. If he had a radio available, why was he spending his time laying a submarine telegraphy cable?
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January 2011
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.
Mr. Yagoda in his very interesting “Lullaby of Tin Pan Alley” (October/ November 1983) tells us Al Jolson was snatched from a “Lower East Side Synagogue” to become a song plugger. Asa Yoelson came to this country from Russia at age four and settled with his family in Washington, D.C. Asa was snatched from a lower southwest Washington, D.C., synagogue to begin his journey to fame. Just like the Irish and Italians, not all Jewish immigrants getting off boats settled in New York City.
PICTURES LIE . Or they can be made to lie. Joseph McCarthy knew that, and so do all the lesser propagandists with products or political causes to sell.
Historians know it, too, and for a very long time too many of them used old pictures selectively to portray a relentlessly cheerful American past that never was. The oversize shelves of every library are filled with nostalgic picture books in which our parents and our grandparents and their parents come off as quaint and dear; less shrewd, somehow, than we are; admirable, maybe, but awfully naive and fit only to live in their clean, untroubled, slow-paced world. The cliché had it that our ancestors lived in “simpler times.”
All of this is nonsense, of course. Times were never simple. And ever since the turbulence and disillusionment of the 1960s, the chastened compilers of picture histories have tried hard to restore the balance, to include the seamy and the painful as well as the sunny aspects of our past.
OVER THE PAST few years, I’ve been careful to preserve the kind words that prominent men and women have said about A MERICAN H ERITAGE . While it might be unseemly for the editors of the magazine to blow their own horn, I, as the proud papa of this enterprise, see no reason not to share a few bracing reactions and observations with our readers:
BARBARA TUCHMAN: I have been a regular reader of A MERICAN H ERITAGE for what must be close to twenty-five years. It always has something I like, something I did not know before, something I am glad to know about. I hope it goes on forever.
WILLIAM S. PALEY: It deepens our understanding of America’s past, and makes learning about that past a pleasure.
Editor's Note: The author fought in Korea and Vietnam, wrote several books of military history, and was the editor of Vietnam Magazine.
WHAT WAS IT like to have been cut off and surrounded like that platoon of Company B? A similar experience was vividly described by then Army Specialist Jack P. Smith, the son of the ABC news commentator Howard K. Smith. Smith was assigned to Company C, 2d Battalion, 7th Cavalry, part of the relief force that replaced the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, on November 16. The next morning his battalion was moving overland to Landing Zone Albany, some six miles northeast of Landing Zone X-ray, when they ran into an ambush. Like his political and military leaders in Washington and Saigon, who failed to make the critical distinction between the Southern Viet Cong guerrillas and the North Vietnamese regular army, Smith uses the terms Cong and PAVN (i.e., North Vietnamese army) interchangeably. The enemy unit that ambushed his company was, in fact, a battalion of the North Vietnamese 66th Regiment that was retreating from the earlier battle at Landing Zone X-ray. Smith relates:
TO A CASUAL OBSERVER , the first window on the north face of New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine looks as traditional and reverent as stainedglass windows the world over. But viewed up close, the fourteen thousand pieces of glass reveal scenes of baseball, fishing, and golf—almost as if to remind worshipers of the fun they might be having if they weren’t in church. Much of the credit for the window’s unconventional design belongs to Elizabeth Manning, daughter of William T. Manning, Bishop of New York from 1921 to 1946. Miss Manning attended the 1924 Olympics in Paris and was so moved by the proceedings that she persuaded her father and Ralph Adams Cram, the architect of the cathedral, to devote one of its fourteen windows to the glory of sport. The two men promptly appointed a fundraising committee to come up with the more than $150,000 needed to build the window. Fund raising, however, proved more difficult than expected, and it was not until 1951 that the window was installed and dedicated.