Although Robert Friedman’s “Digging Up the U.S.” (August/September) is generally a fine article, I was somewhat dismayed by his statement that in Virginia in the 1930s and 1940s, “Any excavating for artifacts had to be done at a prearranged distance from the site, and sometimes, as at Colonial Williamsburg, the two groups [archaeologists and architects] almost came to blows.” Having done the research for a book on the history of archaeology in Williamsburg, I can state without equivocation that in the years from 1931 to 1957 no explosive differences of opinion surfaced between Colonial Williamsburg’s architects and archaeologists. On the contrary, its archaeologists were architectural draftsmen on the senior architect’s own staff.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
POTTER STEWART CAME TO the Supreme Court in 1958, appointed by President Eisenhower at the age of forty-three. The product of a prominent Ohio family long given to public service, he himself had served on the Cincinnati City Council and as a judge of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. As the second youngest Supreme Court appointee in this century, Justice Stewart was able to sit for twenty-three years and retire, in 1981, at just sixty-six, an age when many a justice has only begun to hit his stride and some are still learning the ropes.
In his quarter-century on the country’s highest bench, Justice Stewart managed to keep his private philosophy very much to himself, subordinating his views on what might be good or bad for American society to his conscientious reading of the Constitution. He was fond of rejecting such labels as “liberal” and “conservative,” favoring instead such formulas as “I’d like to be thought of as a lawyer—a good lawyer, looking at every case under the Constitution and the law.”
Thank you, from an old sailor (I served aboard the Essex-class carrier Valley Forge after World War II), for the seafaring issue (April/May). The story of the Essex disaster was particularly interesting because of its repercussions throughout American literature of that period. Also, could that story be the origin or inspiration for the poem “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell” by W. S. Gilbert? This is about a shipwreck, too, and a sample verse suggests the connection:
Talking about battleships in his interview, Captain Beach misses the point that one of the battleship’s greatest assets is its guns. He is correct about range but ignores the number of rounds carried for the guns as opposed to missiles. A ship is only as good as its station-keeping abilities, and limiting its number of rounds surely affects that ability. A Cruise missile costs far more than a sixteen-inch round, and I am left with doubts about the cost effectiveness of interdicting fire against an isolated incident involving, say, a company of men and three or four tanks raiding an outpost. I would also bet my bottom dollar that a sixteen-inch shell not only carries more conventional explosives than a Cruise missile, but within its range, countermeasures against that incoming round are virtually impossible, whereas the Cruise can get hit.
DURING THE FIRST half of the nineteenth century, there lived in the Connecticut River valley of Massachusetts a scholar and country editor with an insatiable curiosity about the region in which he lived. His name was Sylvester Judd, and his work, except for one posthumous and locally printed history of the nearby village of Hadley, Massachusetts, is practically unknown. Yet by indefatigable and lifelong labors in searching old records and interviewing old inhabitants, he was able to bring together an unprecedented amount of information about village life in colonial New England.
As a lifetime radio fan, I greatly enjoyed Alice Goldfarb Marquis’s “Radio Grows Up” in the August/September issue. However, I noted two small errors in the account. Marquis says that New York’s WHN is now WMGM. WHN did carry the call letters WMGM in the fifties when the station broadcast a Top Forty format and was owned by Loews Corporation. It reverted to WHN in the early sixties, when Storer Broadcasting purchased it and changed the format. WHN is now owned by Mutual Broadcasting System and broadcasts country music.
Marquis also mentioned that the Federal Radio Commission refused to renew the license of WCRW (Chicago) because of its excessive advertising. This decision must have been overturned, because WCRW is still on the air in Chicago, broadcasting five hours a day of Spanish-language programing and sharing its frequency with two small stations, WSBC and WEDC.
Ms. Marquis’s otherwise excellent summary of “Radio Grows Up” contains an error. The crystal radio sets of the early twenties didn’t use germanium; instead, it was galena, a much cheaper and more plentiful crystal, which then sold for twenty-five cents apiece. Ask any old-timer!
It is my recollection that we used a chunk of galena as a rectifier in building the early radio sets. One contact was through the mounting clamp, the other through a very delicately adjusted “cat’s whisker,” a stiff wire spring. I believe the germanium rectifier was a later development and may have eliminated the cat’s whisker contact, which was always quite frustrating, the signal being very intermittent.
SHE WAS THE largest moving object that mankind had ever built. She was the first liner to cross the Atlantic at better than 30 knots, the first to exceed 1,000 feet in length, the first truly modern ship. She coddled her passengers with a spaciousness, luxury, and cuisine that has never been equaled. She was the Normandie, France’s pride and America’s joy. She lived a life of glory and acclaim. And she died horribly, at the hands of strangers.
In the 1920s Pierre de Malglaive, a director of Transat (Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, or the French Line) convinced his company that it could dominate Atlantic passenger trade if it built a vessel larger, faster, and more elegant than any other. Malglaive took his idea to Transat’s favorite shipyard, Penhoët, at Saint Nazaire. There he met a man with vision equal to his own: a junior engineer named Vladimir Yourkevitch, a Russian émigré who had once designed warships for the czar.
Despite THE movie exhibitor of the thirties who once pleaded, “Don’t send me any more pictures that start where a guy is writing with a feather, ” American history has always been one of the themes of American movies. There are so many good plots and great characters in our past that one can easily conceive of an entertaining, if preposterous, history of the United States made up of clips from several hundred films: from Drums Along the Mohawk to Suiter’s Gold to Gone With the Wind; from Sergeant York to Little Caesar to The Grapes of Wrath to Pride of the Marines to All the President’s Men.