January 2011

T HE VIOLENT DEATH of a private individual may make a stir for a few days, but then its memory fades for all except the closest friends and relations. When a world leader—a President—dies violently, the memory of the event becomes part of the national fabric. Because John F. Kennedy was young and still seemed to give promise of great things to come, his assassination is not only remembered vividly by all who were alive at the time, it was instantly transposed from history to myth. No wonder, then, that the twentieth anniversary of his death this November will bring forth a rush of tributes, memoirs, and réévaluations. A MERICAN H ERITAGE , too, plans to mark the anniversary. Meanwhile, another kind of story about Kennedy—little known and yet remarkably revealing—is featured in this issue.

ONE NIGHT in 1888, from the stage of a Broadway theater, the actor DeWolf Hopper recited for the first time a poem about a ballplayer, known only as the Mighty Casey, who struck out. Though Hopper had added the epic to his show as a one-time performance honoring the presence of the baseball great “Cap” Anson, the ovation that followed should have warned him he would be stuck with Casey for the rest of his life.

But there is another Casey in the realm of baseball lore who has been completely overlooked. Well, nearly so. Perhaps one person in ten thousand who knows the verses to the game’s most famous song will remember a thoroughly dedicated baseball groupie named Katie Casey.

CROATE, 1935

THIS TIME they were really in trouble. The twelve boys lined up in the headmaster’s office at the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, awaited sentencing for their crime. It was Monday, February 11, a glowering, heavy-skied New England winter morning. The loudest sound in the headmaster’s chambers was the rattle and hiss of the radiator. The headmaster sat silent at his desk. Before announcing their punishment, he would wait until every one of the thirteen accused was in his presence. All of them were guilty. One of them was missing.

TAKING STOCK of painting in the South in 1859, a critic for the New Orleans Daily Cresent concluded glumly, “Artist roam the country of the North, turning out pictures by the hundred yearly, but none come to glean the treasures with which grand and beautiful country of the South and its peculiar life abound.” The reason many artists stayed away was that throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, the region’s poor roads, widely scattered population, and almost entirely agricultural economy made it difficult to earn a living there. Artist born in the South, like those emigrating from abroad, tended to gravitate to Niagara Falls and the Hudson River valley.

RUSSELL LYNES , despite being known to his friends as the most amiable of men, is nationally famous as a witty and sometimes acerbic commentator on American society and its manners.

RUSSELL LYNES , despite being known to his friends as the most amiable of men, is nationally famous as a witty and sometimes acerbic commentator on American society and its manners. Nothing Lynes ever did on the subject attracted more attention than an article entitled “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” that appeared in the February 1949 issue of Harper’s (of which Lynes was then managing editor) and a chart on American tastes classified from highbrow to lowbrow that appeared in Life magazine two months later. For a season or so, dividing American objects, pastimes, and people into highbrow, upper or lower middlebrow, and lowbrow was something of a national sport.

ALONG THE jagged coastline of Southern California, past the hills and forests of Malibu, five miles down from the Santa Monica Mountains, just short of Muscle Beach and the town of Venice, there sits some of the most quaintly decrepit oceanside property in America. The Santa Monica beach hardly looks different from the way it did a few years after World War II: the same huge arch along the entryway, the same calliope with the lighthouse-shaped apartment on top, the same small seafood diner.

T HE VIOLENT DEATH of a private individual may make a stir for a few days, but then its memory fades for all except the closest friends and relations. When a world leader—a President—dies violently, the memory of the event becomes part of the national fabric. Because John F. Kennedy was young and still seemed to give promise of great things to come, his assassination is not only remembered vividly by all who were alive at the time, it was instantly transposed from history to myth. No wonder, then, that the twentieth anniversary of his death this November will bring forth a rush of tributes, memoirs, and réévaluations. A MERICAN H ERITAGE , too, plans to mark the anniversary. Meanwhile, another kind of story about Kennedy—little known and yet remarkably revealing—is featured in this issue.

In 1833 President Andrew Jackson made a tour of New England, a part of the country that had not been inclined to look upon him with favor. But his stand against nullification had won him some friends, and the president of Harvard, Josiah Quincy, proposed to the overseers that the college bestow upon Jackson an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. The board agreed, over the objection of John Quincy Adams, who vowed that he would not “be present to see my darling Harvard disgrace herself by conferring a doctor’s degree upon a barbarian who could hardly spell his own name.” Quincy’s view was less elitist: “As the people have twice decided this man knows enough law to be their ruler, it is not for Harvard College to maintain that they are mistaken.”

On June 6 two entrepreneurs named Richard Hollingshead, Jr., and Willis Smith opened the world’s first drive-in movie theater on a ten-acre site in Camden, New Jersey. The screen was forty by fifty feet, and the sound equipment was supplied by the RCA-Victor Company. There were two shows a night. Nine rows of inclined ramps accommodated five hundred cars.

In the same month, Disney released the cartoon feature Three Little Pigs in something like living color. (It was not, however, the first color cartoon: that honor goes to an epic entitled The Debut of Thomas Kat , made in New York City in 1916.) Two men particularly interested in the fortunes of the pigs were the cousins Jock and Sonny Whitney. They announced that they had bought a substantial share of the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation and were forming a production company, Pioneer Pictures, to make feature-length color films.

WHO’S ON FIRST? THE AMERICAN LITERARY HERITAGE