January 2011

Roosevelt dictated the broad outline of what he’d like to convey:

Roy Howard, head of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, had once been in FDR’s camp but was now supporting Willkie. On Friday, September 6,1940, Roosevelt discussed with unidentified aides Howard’s activities and what the White House might do about them behind the scenes.

Despite hour upon hour of repeated listening, some conversations simply defy transcription. Perhaps improvements in the technology of sound will some day allow them all to be reconstituted; in the meantime, here are passages that seemed too intriguing to omit.

One day in late September, FDR was closeted with several aides evidently going over a list of requests for federal posts made by party leaders across the country.

First up is Frank Hague, the notorious boss of Jersey City, with whom Roosevelt had forged an arm’s-length alliance for the duration of the campaign. Hague’s nominee is so crooked, one aide says, that Hague himself has just called to say “he’s unfit, but he says he’s also got to write you… that he’s all right. But he doesn’t mean it.” FDR laughs, then roars: “Very simple, send him a letter saying we cannot appoint ____ [banging his desk]. Give me another name !”

The Committee on Publications of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, has recently offered us a commentary on Dr. Julius Silberger, Jr. ‘s article on Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the religion, which appeared in our December 1980 issue:

“One thing on which Mrs. Eddy’s admirers and critics agree is that she was a ‘remarkable’ woman. The fact that she founded a major American religious movement in an age and at an age when she might have been expected, in her own ironic words, to be a little old lady in a lace cap, justifies at least that much of a generalization.

“But remarkable people are more often than not complex. And when their lives are as long as Mrs. Eddy’s was (she lived from 1821 to 1910) they often change in remarkable ways, becoming virtually several different people in the course of their evolving experience. This makes it all the more necessary to avoid winding the threads of such a life onto the single spool of one’s own interests and assumptions.

Our “Postscripts” item on the origin of the Purple Heart medal (April/ May 1981) brought a singular response from H. B. Hersey of Placentia, California: “One of my grandfather’s fellow homesteaders and neighbors in northeast South Dakota was a Civil War veteran named Joseph W. Cotes. As a child, I would see him whenever I visited my grandfather’s homestead. I hadn’t seen him in some years when, in 1938, I was in the area, went to his farm, and was delighted to find him hale and hearty, though in his nineties. At that time he showed me what he told me was a Purple Heart medal.

Hardly anyone now alive has not had a run-in of one kind or another with a malfunctioning computer—a garbled address label on a magazine, a dunning notice for a bill long paid, that sort of thing. Quite often, such mishaps are ascribed to “bugs,” those mythical insects that have inhabited the machinery of America for generations, making the term “getting the bugs out” a solidly entrenched part of the language.

But once upon a time there was a real bug in a computer—and not just any computer either: it was the Navy’s Mark II, one of the progenitors of modern computer technology. Navy Captain Grace Murray Hopper, the originator of electronic computer automatic programing and today with the Naval Data Automation Command in Washington, told the story recently in Annals of the History of Computing , a publication of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies:

Joan Paterson Kerr’s “Patchwork Primitives” in our April/May 1981 issue brought an interesting response from reader John Maass, a frequent contributor to this department: “Jean Lipman’s ‘primitives’ are ingenious, but her memory may be faulty concerning the painting shown on pages 22–23. In your caption for the picture, you say that ‘the striking pattern of the painting … was inspired by a Connecticut Congregational church Jean Lipman had once driven past and photographed.’ I think it’s more likely that the pattern was inspired by a photograph I took of the (Dutch) Reformed Church in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1955. The picture appeared in my 1957 book, The Gingerbread Age , and was also reproduced in several of the reviews that followed its publication. The next time I passed the church, those interesting sectional shutters were gone, and they were never put back.”

Michener’s history

… The historical novels of James A. Michener, ranging in subject matter from the origins of Judaism ( The Source ) to the birth and growth of a small Colorado town ( Centennial ), have been one of the major publishing phenomena of the twentieth century. In a graceful and reflective essay, the author talks about the wedding of history and fiction. “Each generation,” he tells us, “deserves its own historical novels, because each will have its own interpretations of what has gone before.”

Lincoln’s kidnaping

… The President was dead and buried, but there were those who would not let him rest in peace. Deane and Peggy Robertson narrate the extraordinary tale of the 1876 plot to kidnap Lincoln’s body and hold it for ransom.

Mrs. Webb’s dream

A great “intensity of thought,” Abraham Lincoln once counseled his friend Joshua Speed, “will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” No aspect of Lincoln’s character has become more tangibly real in the literature than his melancholy. “No man in this agony,” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in 1864 after a visit with the President, “has suffered more and deeper, albeit with a dry, weary, patient pain, that seemed to some like insensibility.” One observer wrote in a letter dated February 25, 1865, that “his face denotes an immense force of resistance and extreme melancholy. It is plain that this man has suffered deeply.” His friend, Ward Hill Lamon, called him a “man of sorrows” who bore “a continued sense of weariness and pain” and attracted universal sympathy “because he seemed at once miserable and kind.” He was, indeed, “the saddest and gloomiest man of his time.” Toward the end of the war the artist Francis B. Carpenter spent about six months in the White House working on a painting of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. After the war Carpenter wrote a detailed memoir of his impressions.