IN THE SPRING of 1869 a party of engineers, politicians, and businessmen left Brooklyn and headed west in a special train. With them was John Augustus Roebling, the sixtytwo-year-old German-born engineer who had completed his plans for a massive bridge over New York’s East River.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
JFK, twenty years later … John Kennedy was shot twenty years ago, and the world mourned a lost, young, romantic leader. But recently historians have been asking: Was he really a great President? Or was he an implacable Cold Warrior, disguised as a king in Camelot? William E. Leuchtenburg sums up the current thinking. Shadowland revisited … Before the moviemakers came, it was just a beautiful piece of California real estate; then it was Hollywood ! In a festive holiday section on American moviemaking, Kevin Brownlow writes of Hollywood’s earliest years and the armed truce between the film makers and the landed gentry; another feature recalls the greatest collection of screen tough guys the world has ever known; and Joseph Schrank tells the incredible story of what it was like for an innocent New York writer to go west and work for Darryl Zanuck on a Betty Grable opus. A permanent world’s fair …
Benghazi, Libya, July 23,1943. Something new is in the air! This morning we were introduced to a Major Blank, an expert in low-level bombing, who lectured us on a new bombsight, which was a converted gunsight. He explained how A-20s had been making low-level attacks and that experiments were being made with B-24s. He said that he didn’t know if the new sights would ever be used, but we assumed the Air Force wouldn’t be running experiments that far out in the desert for nothing, so we decided to get interested in low-level bombing.
THE PAST ,” the great French historian Marc Bloch once wrote, “is, by definition, a datum which nothing in the future will change.” This seems so obvious as scarcely to merit mention. Is not the common expression “That’s history” another way of saying that something is finished, over, dead and gone? Yet Bloch also wrote that history “is constantly transforming and perfecting itself.” This is not so obvious, yet anyone who reads knows that history is constantly being rewritten. New books on old subjects pour from the presses in an unending stream.
The reason Bloch’s apparently contradictory statements are both true is that the word history has two meanings. History is indeed the past, “what actually happened” as another great historian put it. But history is also what people have written about the past. To make the distinction clear in what follows, I shall refer to the past as “history” and to writing about the past as “History.”
FOR A SHORT, fierce time during the war, I knew Winston Churchill very well. After the war and until his death, I saw him less often. But my memories of him at the height of his power have never left me. Winston Churchill was, above all, a romantic whose power lay in his capacity to shape the world to his vision. He led men and women to outdo themselves, to accomplish far more than they had thought they could. He did it by insisting on the reality of the impossible and, through the force of his character and eloquence, brought others to share his belief.
Yet doubt sometimes overcame him: doubt not of his own mission or of his people’s strength but of his own worth. In defiance he was glorious. But when rejection followed triumph, he lost that central confidence for a time—a longer time than most people know—and almost foundered in uncertainty.
ONE DAY IN 1922 a young would-be composer named Richard Rodgers paid a call on Max Dreyfus, head of the publishing firm of T. B. Harms and dean of Tin Pan Alley. Rodgers had been there before; three years earlier, Max’s brother Louis had shown him the door, saying, “Keep going to high school and come back some other time.” This time, however, Max himself granted him an audience. “This ascetic-looking titan of the music business sat with eyes half-closed as I played my songs,” wrote Rodgers in his autobiography. When he had gone through his repertoire, Dreyfus spoke: “There is nothing of value here. I don’t hear any music and I think you’d be making a great mistake.”
In 1925 though, when Rodgers had two successful shows on Broadway, Dreyfus summoned him back and offered him a contract as a staff writer. Rodgers was still associated with Dreyfus when the publisher died forty years later. Dreyfus was smart enough to acknowledge his mistakes.
There is no better example of both how collaborative an institution Tin Pan Alley was and how one of its songs could catch the public’s fancy than the smash hit of 1923, “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” The song originated one evening when Frank Silver, a musician in Irving Cohn’s New York Band, was over at a girl friend’s house. The girl’s kid brother kept repeating over and over a phrase he had picked up from the neighborhood fruit seller, a Greek immigrant. The twenties was a decade of nonsense songs—“I Love to Dunk a Hunk of Sponge Cake,” “Diga, Diga, Doo,” “I’m Wild About Horns on Automobiles That Go Ta-Ta-Ta-Ta,” “I Faw Down an’ Go Boom,” and others—and Silver saw the possibilities. He picked out a melody, brought the results to his boss, and soon the number was a popular request.
IN MARCH THE NIGHTS were long and black over the airfield at Bassingbourn, which lies just north of London. Its latitude is about the same as that of Hudson Bay, and this proximity to the Arctic Circle means long summer days and long winter nights. During the cold months the B-17s of the 91st Bombardment Group took off in the dark: a blackout was strictly enforced, all the windows had heavy curtains, and even the flashlights had recessed bulbs.
Germantown, Pennsylvania, was founded in October of this year, the first of the German townships in America. Its birth was the direct result, six years after the event, of a visit made by the Englishman William Penn to Frankfurt in 1677. Frankfurt was then the center of the German Pietists, a sect of devout, semi-mystical Christians whose purpose was to loosen the rigid, creed-bound systems of the Lutheran Church. Their emphasis on the individual spirit made it likely that they would find a kindred soul in the famous Quaker, and he kindred souls in them. When Penn, a few years later, became a great landholder in America, it was natural that a large number of his German friends should wish to join him in his “holy experiment.” The Frankfurt Land Company was formed: it purchased fifteen thousand acres of American soil, made an extraordinary man named Francis Daniel Pastorius its agent, and the Germans began to come.