January 2011

When a weary rider galloped into Philadelphia with word of Cornwalli’s surrender at Yorktown two hundred years ago this month, the Continental Congress was so strapped for funds that each member had to put up dollar from his own pocket to pay the messenger’s expenses.

The news he brought would have been cheap at any price. The American victory, wrote an exultant James Madison, would surely “cool the phrenzy and relax the pride of Britain.” It did just that, though a final peace and official independence were still two years away. (In this issue we tell of the near-miraculous combination of circumstances that made the American triumph possible.)

Often for good and sufficient reasons, the American West of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is perceived as a Dionysian mix of careless enthusiasm, greed, violence, and irresponsibility—its icon the lone cowboy on horseback, its principal institution the swinging-door saloon, its communities slipshod arrangements of dirt streets and false fronts, occasionally disturbed by the sound of gunfire.

The idea is simple and sound and goes back at least to the American Civil War: to direct artillery fire intelligently, the higher you are above the target, the better. At ground level it’s difficult to tell just how far short or long your shells are falling. In the Civil War they used balloons; in the First World War they were still using balloons, along with airplanes equipped with telegraph keys; in the Second World War the airplane had supplanted the balloon, but just barely. The United States Army of those days was not a hotbed of innovation, and when I reported for training as an artillery spotter pilot at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in early 1942, there was still an enormous building on the post called the Balloon Hangar, even though no balloons were to be seen.

“Explosion in the Magic Valley,” our picture story in the April/May 1981 issue, brought forth two unusual items in response. The story had to do with the birth of Twin Falls, Idaho, as an adjunct to a private irrigation project in 1905 and featured the pictures of the pioneer photographer Clarence Bisbee.

The first reaction came from Tom Parkinson, president of the Circus Historical Society in Savoy, Illinois: “In regard to the photograph on pages 34–35 depicting a ‘1904’ circus parade, the correct date was 1909. The posters on the wall behind the elephants might lead one to believe that this was the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. Wrong. It was the Sells Floto Circus, which came to Twin Falls on July 3, 1909; Hagenbeck-Wallace, which did come to Twin Falls on July 23 of that year, had more elephants than those shown in the photograph.

Professor Robert H. Ferrell, who discovered Harry S. Truman’s previously unpublished Potsdam diary (June/July 1980), has uncovered further evidence of the President’s spiky character:

“Rummaging through some notes here in the office, I found some of Truman’s marginalia on letters sent to him after he left the Presidency. The comments were made to his secretary, Rose Conway, and a selection vividly recalls the man:

‘File it. Looks like crackpots.

‘File it. No ans. I told him the facts and he has garbled them!

‘Thank him & tell him the Louisville Courier-Journal has always been after circulation and not facts & morals.

‘File it. No interest. The figure is 100% wrong but as Coolidge said, don’t argue with skunks. HST

‘Thank him and tell him Winchell never tells the truth.

When Harvey L. Morris of La Palrna, California, opened the February/March issue, he was astonished to find himself looking at his mother. She is the Red Cross nurse on page 87, bathing the eyes of a gassed soldier.

“Her name was then Ida Marie Lichtsinn of Indianapolis, Indiana. She took nurse’s training at Fort Wayne Lutheran Hospital, graduating in the class of 1912.

“She enlisted as a nurse at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. Before going overseas she was assigned to Fort Lewis, Washington, where she met my father, a patient of hers and a private in the 91st Division. (Years later they met again, and one thing led to another, et cetera, and they were married in 1928.)

“The years 1917–18 found her serving in France and Belgium. Toward the end of the war she was wounded in action during a shelling, suffering a severe leg injury for which she received veterans compensation until her death in 1975. Many times during the Depression, it was all we had to go on.

Politicians, on the whole, sadly lack a sense of history. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York is a rare exception: he not only has made history, he has written it, and in his sprightly newsletter he often draws important lessons from the past. In a recent issue he warned of the perils we face when we seek to tamper too quickly with the laws under which we govern ourselves.

John Waldsmith, who is curator/librarian of the National Stereoscopic Association’s Oliver Wendell Holmes Stereoscopic Research Library at the Canton (Ohio) Art Institute, was understandably taken with the “blizzard” of images we presented in “Theodore Roosevelt, President” by Edmund Morris (June/July 1981):

“On pages ten and eleven you have a montage of Theodore Roosevelt. I have one of the original prints in my collection. The print measures 13 by 20½ inches and was given to readers of the Farm and Fireside of Springfield, Ohio, in 1908. The montage was created and patented by Underwood & Underwood of New York City. Here is how Farm and Fireside described the print:

The 1831 painting exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum was the cause of much rejoicing on the part of the critic for the prestigious North American Review , with a single salient exception: he had no use for still lifes. The painter who copied brass kettles or game might be “somewhat more refined than the tinker or cook who handles the originals,” said the critic, but his efforts were mere mechanical labor, to be valued “very lightly.” The trouble, of course, was that still lifes didn’t offer moral instructions, or grand themes, or the likenesses of people who embodied either. Many shared the critic’s low opinion, and one searches in vain through the old auction lists seeking the name of any collector who specialized in still lifes.

In 1961 three rockhounds found an unusual nodule near Olancha, California. It contained ceramic, copper, and iron components and seemed obviously man-made. Although ( California is the home of some of the world’s finest universities, the discoverers took the artifact to the Charles Ford Society, reportedly “an organization specializing in examining extraordinary things.” The results were predictably extraordinary. Rene Noorbergen, an author of books on psychics and other bizarre phenomena, assures us that the artifact is at least a half million years old and therefore must predate the biblical flood. To him, the nodule is an “oopart” (out-of-place-artifact) that demands explanation, the more fanciful the better, Noorbergen has also searched for proof of Noah’s elusive ark on Mount Ararat and has studied yards of lie-detector graphs that testify to the honesty of an old Armenian who claims to have seen the ark as a boy.