January 2011

INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

We are a profligate people, justly celebrated for the way in which we make things, use things, and then throw them away. The evidence is all around us.

But there is a contradiction here: if we throw away, we also keep, in the manner of an aging person squirreling away packets of love letters from a long-dead romance. To such a person, the letters represent more than nostalgia; they are part of a personal history, tangible evidence of a life once lived, and hence important. As a nation, we are much the same. It would be difficult to think of another people who have been so conscious, from the beginning, of taking part in the very stuff of history, of being involved in the greatest social and political experiment of all time. And as if to reinforce that conviction, we have done our own kind of squirreling away.

Consider the objects on the opposite page, unprepossessing but redolent with history—for they are the writing case and one of the camp cups used by George Washington during the Revolution.

Lincoln Steffens was a young reporter for the Commercial Advertiser during the late 1890’s, and he always remembered it as a grand time for a New York City newspaperman: “There was the Cuban war, the Boer war, and best of all—Tammany was back in power.” Tammany Hall, “which has voters but no friends,” had just had its hold on City Hall briefly shaken by a reform administration; now, “hungry and irritated,” it was back in business, “providing us with a world of public enemies to hate and unconcealed schemes to expose.” And no public enemy should have been more hate-worthy than William S. Devery; certainly no Tammany man hatched more transparent schemes. Bulky, blatant, and insatiable, Big Bill Devery was a sort of human parade float advertising civic corruption. But Steffens and his fellow reporters discovered that they could not overcome a steady fondness for the man; in his way, he was perfect: “as a character, as a work of art, he was a masterpiece.”

For well over two hundred years, the doryman was an integral part of American life, though rarely given his fair due. He was a fisherman, the hardiest of a hardy lot who went down to the sea in ships and from there, in tiny boats, to harvest both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. If it was a hard trade, it also was a proud one, so much so that an anonymous doryman at the turn of the century was driven to a splendid bit of doggerel: “I want no fuss with the pale-faced cuss—/ The clerk or piano tuner—/ Who spend their lives in those hives/ In the struggle for more mazuma./ But give me the wind-swept ocean’s space,/ Where the ‘flat ones’ flop in the dory’s waist,/ And the salt scud whips in your upturned face,/ As you pull for the side of your schooner.”

I have enjoyed very much the story in your issue for August/September 1981 on Sergeant York by Nat Brandt.

I remember Sergeant York from a single meeting when he visited Providence, Rhode Island, in the early 1920’s and spoke at a public meeting in promotion of his campaign for improved education for the people of Appalachia.

Sergeant York impressed me mightily, as a genuinely sincere and forthright person. I remember little of what he said, except for one story that generated great applause and that still remains vividly in my memory. It was a sort of fable, I suppose, and it beautifully symbolized the man and his purpose.

He said that there was once a bus (or maybe a little train that couldn’t), which was stuck on a steep hill. The conductor came through, saying: “All first-class passengers keep your seats. All second-class passengers get out and walk. All third-class passengers get out and push.” The sergeant had little need to draw his moral, which was that he hoped that “everyone here is a third-class passenger.” It might have been corny, but it wasn’t.

I read an article in the October/ November 1981 issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE about one-room schools of the West. The pictures you show are palaces in comparison with the facts as I knew them.

I started in a one-room log building in Lakeview, Idaho, a small mining town, in 1900. Now there are a few summer homes there. My first school ran three months in the summer. The teacher got thirty-five dollars a month and boarded around. That is one week at one home and the next at another. No charge. The cabin is in a sad state now. About five or six children.

We moved in 1906 to a small farming area along Penderielle Lake in Idaho. It was a larger log cabin—thirty to forty children. Summer term started in May.

1782 1882 1932

Some time ago a man lit on a publishing idea that seemed obvious enough but apparently had never been tried before: since people are most interested in the doings of famous people, why not devote a magazine to just that? And, for good measure, have it well illustrated? And so the new publication appeared—in 1895.

But unhappily for Benjamin Joseph Falk, the People magazine of the 1890’s did not fare so well as its lusty descendant. For one thing, of course, there were no supermarkets to display it next to the cash register; for another, the best advertising Falk seemed able to attract was for Dr. Jaeger’s Normal Sanitary Underwear. Moreover, it was expensive—thirty-five cents an issue in an era when most magazines cost a dime. This was the fault of production costs, for Falk apparently felt the state of the art in printing was not up to what he had in mind: he wanted every illustration to be an actual photograph, pasted to the page.

I have just read your beautiful article on Bernard Maybeck. However, Mr. Reinhardt’s description of Mr. Maybeck is very funny! He really did not have an “odd, gnomelike little figure.” He was five feet five inches tall. He did not wear bib overalls. He had one knitted tam-o’-shanter among the French berets he wore since Paris days. I did not think the “Mickey Mouse” description of the Berkeley hills was valid and it certainly was not dignified—or true.

When Maybeck worked, he wore work clothes. When he was in the city he wore custom-tailored suits—expensive ones from Brooks Brothers! He always gave an impression of dignity—no one ever thought him cute or a gnome or leprechaun. The Bohemian and Commonwealth clubs did not give membership to leprechauns.

Where are the “gunny-sack cloisters,” I wonder, and what makes University of California professors and students “weird”? I was there as a student and became Maybeck’s daughter-in-law in 1927 and I live in that “great redwood timbered house”—not so big, just nice. He would have liked the eighteen-cent stamp of the Palace issued Sept. 29.

Some time ago, I was given a bottle of after-shave lotion that was in production during the American Revolution and was sold to the officers of both sides. I failed to note the manufacturer’s name, and now I have no idea where to go. Can you help?

Mr. Wiley is doubtless referring to Number Six cologne, which has been sold for more than two hundred years by Caswell-Massey, the oldest chemists and perfumers in America. Made from bergamot, musk, orange blossom, lemon, and a score of other ingredients, Number Six was a favorite of George Washington himself, who is said to have sent some to his friend the Marquis de Lafayette. As in the eighteenth century, the cologne is aged for two years in oaken casks before bottling; however, it is now somewhat stronger than it was in Washington’s day, when, says Caswell-Massey’s owner, Ralph Taylor, “people bathed rather infrequently, and it was used as a mild-scented bottled water for sponge bathing.”