January 2011

TANNENVENTOR WEEPING BITTERLIE DIGS DIGS NO ELIZABETHAN COURTIER, HE NO ELIZABETHAN COURTIER, HE NOSTALGIC PARTS ADJUSTED FIRE

He arrived in Manila on March 18, 1899, bearing his six-foot-four frame with such easy strength that it would have been natural to wonder how he could so recently have suffered the “ill health” for which he had been relieved of the military governorship of Santiago.

Hollywood ordinarily leaves American history well alone. But two of the winter’s big movies turn out to be meditations on early twentieth-century America. Ragtime , drawn from E. L. Doctorow’s novel, is set in the period from 1906 to 1908; Reds , based on the lives of John Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant, from 1915 to 1920. Ragtime ’s theme- the dangerous tensions building up under the syncopated cheeriness of American society before the First World War—predicts the revolutionary explosions of Reds . Indeed, the two films nearly had the anarchist Emma Goldman in common as a major character, though in the end the Goldman sequences were cut from Ragtime . The films differ, however, in cinematic style and in attitudes toward history.

Twenty-two loyal, smart, perceptive, patient, and diligent readers submitted answers in our pick - the matching - TR - picture contest. This small historical challenge started with an astonishing Roosevelt montage we used to illustrate a story in our June/July issue. We hadn’t been able to find out much about the picture and were enlightened (as we always hope we will be when we can’t find an answer) by a reader—John Waldsmith, who owns one of the originals of this print. Mr. Waldsmith’s explanation appeared in the “Postscripts” section of our October/November issue, and we offered a free year’s subscription to the first reader sharp-eyed enough to spot the one repeat among the five hundred images of Roosevelt that make up the montage.

In the portfolio of Civil War photographs that ran in our June/July 1981 issue, we identified Colonel Joseph Plympton, on page 50, as a Northerner—which was true enough. What wasn’t true was the implication that he’d served in the Civil War. Colonel Jack Rudolph, who wrote the article on Yorktown which we ran in the October/November issue and who knows his military history, tells us that Colonel Plympton “didn’t have anything to do with the Civil War, having died in June, 1860.”

A regular who joined the army in 1812, Plympton served in both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. He was apparently pretty tough: “His nickname,” says Colonel Rudolph, “was ‘Old Ring/ derived from a cute little punishment he used: a soldier awarded garrison punishment had to chop wood with an axe that had a sliding metal ring on the handle. Every time he swung it, the ring slid down and whacked him on the hands. Since he was chained to the axe handle, he couldn’t drop it.

The story of the singularly inept ghouls who attempted to snatch Lincoln’s body (page 76) is a bizarre one, but he was not the only celebrated nineteenth-century American to have his rest disturbed. This other tale was passed along to us by Professor MeI Griffiths of Ouray, Colorado: “The Ute Indian Cemetery on the eastern outskirts of Ignacio, Colorado, contains, close to its center, two whitewashed, cobblestone pyramids, one of which marks the graveyard’s most illustrious occupant: Chief Ouray.

What do the following items have in common—a peerless collection of old American juilts, a 220-foot steam-driven side-wheeler, last of its noble race, and the exact replica of six beautiful rooms in a millionaire’s Park Avenue apartment? The answer is nothing except that they all can be found at one of the most amiable public places in America: the Shelburne Museum at Shelburne, Vermont—”35 buildings on 45 acres and the S.S. Ticonderoga ,” as the little guide to the place puts it. Most of the thirty-five buildings are historic New England structures ranging in date from a 1733 salt-box house to a slate-walled Vermont jailhouse built in 1890. The forty-five acres are chiefly a lovely lawn without a “Keep off the grass” sign in sight.

The American story is rich and astonishingly diverse, but as Bruce Catton noted in our very first issue, everything fits in somewhere. That is one of the continuing joys of editing—and reading—this magazine. This issue, I think, offers a particularly attractive blend of the important and the entertaining. To begin with, we present the candid- and very different—views of three veteran observers of the American scene: John Huston, the master film maker who has memorably re-created so much of our past on the movie screen; James A. Michener, whose immense novels have evoked the history of places as diverse as Hawaii and the Holy Land; and Theodore H. White, the chronicler of a quarter-century of American politics. Our full-length treatment of the dramatic sit-down strikes that paralyzed the automobile industry in the winter of 1936-37 reminds us how hard it was to win the precious right to organize—a right for which the brave workers of Gdansk have so recently risked their lives.

In 1901 Charles Hemry, a Wyoming sheepman, brought his bride, Sedda, to their less than palatial residence in the Big Horn Mountains. She was not discouraged. According to her daughter, Kathleen Hemry of Casper, Wyoming, Sedda “always made everything nice,” and soon she had brightened the curving walls of the sheep wagon with wallpaper and hung lace-trimmed curtains, pictures, and a hand-painted plate alongside the Remington and the Winchester.

The six-by-eleven-foot interior was worked out as economically as a yacht’s, with a bed at one end, a stove at the other, benches along the sides, and a table board stowed under the bed.

Here Sedda stands at the door with a trapped coyote in the foreground; in the inset, baby Wyoma sleeps in the cozy home she joined in 1902. “People came from afar to see the fancy sheep wagon,” says Kathleen Hemry, whose father took these pictures in 1902. We thank both her and her neighbor Charlene Davis, who sent us the photos.