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January 2011
As the truck bearing two coffins rolled out the main cemetery gate onto Potomac Avenue, the spirit of Richard Bland Lee must have sighed, “It’s about time.” In 1980, after 153 years, the brother of LightHorse Harry and uncle of Robert E. was finally going home to Sully Plantation in northern Virginia. Until his remains were disinterred, this little-known Lee, as mild as his middle name, had lain in the District of Columbia’s once-proud Congressional Cemetery.
In 1904 ten-year-old Marion Kahlert was hit by a bread truck and killed, becoming the District of Columbia’s first victim of a motor-vehicle accident. Her grieving mother commissioned from Italy a statue of the child, dressed exactly as she had been when she died, in her Victorian high-button shoes and Kate Greenaway dress. The three-foot-high marble monument has always been a favorite with tourists, but in 1981 vandals smashed it. Stonemasons estimate that it will cost ten thousand dollars to remake, and the cemetery committee is now seeking donations to pay for the work.
T HE LAST OF the English colonies in America—Georgia—comes into being on June 20. The circumstances of its birth are unusual; they symbolize the kind of moral regeneration the Old World hopes the New will provide. Some London philanthropists, led by James Oglethorpe, are concerned over the plight of honest men imprisoned for debt: where better than America to offer them a fresh start in life? His Majesty’s government grants a charter to these “trustees” to manage the colony without profit to themselves. It is to be a model of virtue. No liquor and no slaves. Freedom of conscience for everyone except Catholics. Each man will be given a farm of fifty acres, which is nontransferable. But the settlers, although ready to cope with hostile Indians and Spaniards, find this mandated purity both unattractive and unenforceable. They discover ways of extending their holdings, slaves are imported, and the rum begins to flow freely. By 1754 the trustees have had enough and give up. Georgia becomes a royal colony.
N EW O RLEANS : Shortly after dawn on the morning of June 7, Major E. A. Burke, state treasurer of Louisiana, faces C. H. Parker, the editor of the Picayune , in a field behind a slaughter-house. Both men are holding pistols. Long after the era for this sort of bloody punctilio has passed, they are going to fight a duel. They’re here because Parker, according to an account drafted by his seconds, “rashly inquired through the columns of the Picayune into certain discrepancies in Mr. Burke’s accounts as State Treasurer. He even insinuated that a man who could stuff ballot boxes could steal, and further hinted that in Major Burke’s dictionary could was synonymous with would.”
From the frozen steps of Brown Chapel they could see the car moving toward them down Sylvan Street, past the clapboard homes and bleak, red-brick apartments that dotted the Negro section of Selma, Alabama. In a moment it pulled up at the chapel, a brick building with twin steeples, and the people on the steps sent word inside, where a mass meeting of local blacks was under way. He was here. It was Dr. King. They had waited for him much of the afternoon, singing freedom songs and clapping and swaying to the music. Now they rose in a burst of excitement, and local leaders rushed to greet King and his staff at the doorway. Dressed in an immaculate black suit and tie, he was a short, stocky man with a thin mustache and sad, Oriental eyes. As he mounted the speaker’s platform, the crowd broke into such a tumultuous ovation that the entire church seemed to tremble.
Amidst the visual splendor of “A Painter at War: The Combat Art of Albert K. Murray” in your February/March 1982 issue is a painting, on page 35, intriguingly captioned, “a U.S. Navy blimp comes to the aid of a downed RAF crew deep in the Amazon jungle. ” Would you be able to tell us what the Royal Air Force was doing in the Amazon during World War II and how a U.S. Navy blimp came to be standing by?
During the war, members of the RAF—and the WAAF—ferried American planes from South America to Europe, Africa, and the Far East. Pilots often followed the coastline but sometimes they could cut a thousand miles off their journey by flying over the jungle. Some of them came to grief, and blimps, with their ability to move leisurely and to hover, proved the most effective rescue ships. The Navy had blimp bases along the Brazilian coast, the largest at Santa Cruz, where the inadvertent hospitality of the Germans provided the airships with a huge hangar originally built to house the Graf Zeppelin.
Regarding Dr. Fawn M. Brodie’s article “I Think Hiss Is Lying” (August/ September 1981): Indeed the Hiss-Chambers controversy does continue. Ultimately history will judge it; however, that judgment must derive from facts rather than assumptions, speculation, or innuendo. It would be well, then, to address and refute the following errors of fact in the Brodie piece: That Hiss was exposed as a spy by Chambers—and as early as 1939. Brodie says that Chambers “in 1939 had blown Hiss’s cover as an espionage agent by going to Adolph Berle with his story. …” But according to both FBI records and Berle’s own notes on that meeting, such an exposé never took place. It was Elizabeth Terrill Bentley, another self-confessed Communist, who in November, 1945, spoke of a connection between Hiss and espionage. “It should be noted,” says an FBI report dated January 28, 1949, “that Miss Bentley’s allegations were the first indication received by the FBI that a Soviet espionage ring had existed in Washington.”