If there is a certain amount of confusion in the Supreme Court’s handling of the church-state separation question in various cases, there is even more confusion—and some downright distortion of fact—in Professor Morris’s “The Wall of Separation” (August/September issue).
Re “The Air-Conditioned Century” in your August/September issue: J. Frank Dobie, that great Texan man of letters, once wrote: “Air conditioning ruined Texas. It made it possible for Yankees to live down here.” How true, how true!
Oliver Jensen’s “Days of Unconditioned Air” (“A wet, cold air suffused the building”) revived a tiny addendum of memory in me.
In his article about air conditioning, Robert Friedman pointed out that before conditioning, attendance at movie houses and concert halls would decline dramatically during the summer heat and particularly so in cities like Washington, D.C., a city officially classified by the British Foreign Office as “subtropical.” My native city of St. Louis was similarly classified, and British consular officers received special subtropical pay for service there.
St. Louis beat the summer heat theatrically by various expedients. She offered spectacular outdoor theater at Forest Park’s Municipal Opera, the “Muni” having begun in 1917. In the 1930s the city became the permanent home of one of the last of the showboats, Captain Bill Menke’s Goldenrod . The first-run downtown and midtown movie palaces were “refrigerated.” But a unique Depressionera operation was the outdoor movie house. Many a neighborhood house had an adjoining outdoor area to provide “theater under the stars.” Such spaces enjoyed various names, including skydomes, airdomes and even airdromes .
As a student of railroad history I was delighted to see the charming folk art of David Matthew so nicely reproduced in the August/September issue. Unfortunately a serious error occurred in the commentary on page 69. The locomotive Robert Fulton did indeed become John Bull after being modified with the addition of the four-wheel Jervis bogie truck. However, it was not/is not the same John Bull now residing in the Smithsonian. That Bull was built in 1831 in England by Robert Stephenson and also, after being modified, served for many years on the Camden and Amboy Railroad, a line contemporary with the pioneering Mohawk and Hudson. The C & A John Bull recently celebrated its 150th anniversary. The subsequent history of the M & H John Bull is not so clear. After being modified as mentioned above, it apparently served well enough until 1845. At that time that road’s master mechanic, Walter McQueen, rebuilt the engine a second time and renamed it the Rochester. It probably lasted until the Civil War in that form, but its final history is unknown.
I am not an admirer of Richard Nixon. Nevertheless, I feel the diatribe against him by Walter Karp in the June/July issue should not have appeared in the supposedly dispassionate pages of a history publication.
Mr. Karp might have found it possible to mention that Nixon was not the first President to tape conversations in the Oval Office. I believe that honor goes to Franklin Roosevelt. Vance Bourjaily is more subtle than Mr. Karp, but, I think, no less onesided. At least he is expressing his personal feelings openly.
Thomas B. Morgan replies: I feel a new respect for Arthur Schlesinger’s tears, but what am I to make of the rest of his letter? My premises that Stevenson would win if Kennedy lost, that McCarthy was no Johnson man, and that the ticket was not immaculately conceived seem amply supported by political history, common sense, and recent interviews with key witnesses, including Schlesinger. Neither the nastiness attributed to Reuther and Rauh nor the belated bow toward McCarthy change anything. And, among other sources, Schlesinger’s own book about Robert Kennedy tells us it is no canard to conclude that the Johnson vice-presidential nomination was “already in the works,” put there—for one—by Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post . After all these years it seems that the tragedy of Johnson still haunts Schlesinger, as it must any man who says he was right to support Kennedy over Stevenson in 1960.