January 2011

In the winter of 1953, a few days after his ninety-first birthday, Bernard Ralph Maybeck granted a lengthy interview to a public service radio station in Berkeley, California, the city in which he had lived and worked for six decades. In some respects the interview evidenced little more than the casual curiosity that people feel about someone who has been around for a long, long time. But to a greater extent, it denoted a sudden, belated realization in his hometown that Maybeck, whose work was almost entirely concentrated in a small area of northern California, whose best-known buildings were unclassifiable hybrids of contemporary materials and traditional forms, and whose career had flowered and faded so long ago that almost everyone thought him long dead, was an architectural genius of major international importance.

More than any other single event, Richard Nixon’s dogged pursuit of Alger Hiss made the young congressman from California a national figure. Nixon’s methods and motives in the explosive confrontation between Hiss, the alleged Soviet agent, and his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, foreshadowed Nixon’s actions throughout his career.

Dr. Fawn M. Brodie, who died on January 10 of this year, spent the last seven years of her life working on a study of Nixon—and how he got to be the kind of man he proved to be. Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character , finished only a few weeks before her death, will be published by W. W. Norton in September. This fascinating psychohistory is based not only on the standard sources—including the Watergate tapes—but also on interviews Dr. Brodie conducted with people who knew the ex-President. The controversy this book is sure to arouse will serve as a fitting climax to Dr. Brodie’s controversial career.

A little late for Christmas, the February, 1951, issue of Popular Mechanics featured an ideal gift for mechanically minded, travel-loving Americans: a two-seat, jet-powered helicopter. The cover of the magazine offered a glimpse into our aerial future—a man in hat and overcoat pushing a sleek little yellow helicopter into the garage of his suburban home. A red one hovered over his neighbor’s house. In only two hours, the magazine reported, virtually anybody could learn to fly these machines. According to Stanley Hiller, their inventor, the helicopters were virtually foolproof; unless you “deliberately” flew into a building or a power line, it would be hard to hurt yourself. In an emergency the pilot could always “slow down to a halt in the air and think things over.” But the best news was that the little copters were already “in production.” Because of the war in Korea, Hiller’s entire output was going to the military, but civilian deliveries would begin “just as soon as circumstances permit.”

Pershing called him “the greatest civilian soldier” of World War I. Foch described his exploit in the Argonne as “the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all the armies of Europe.”

And in many ways, Alvin Cullum York did seem the perfect hero: a tall, lean, red-haired man with blue-gray eyes, a crackerjack marksman whose faith made him totally fearless. Yet in other ways he seemed the least likely of heroes—a barely literate pacifist and a conscientious objector. His home was a log cabin in the tiny Cumberland mountain village of Pall Mall, Tennessee, in the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf River, close by what is now the southwestern tip of Daniel Boone National Forest.

Boone was a well-known figure to the young York. “Mountain people are not great readers,” he told a biographer. “But we’re most all good storytellers.… I guess what outsiders call history is just plain storytelling with us.”

The gifted Australian tennis champion, Mervyn Rose, was not much in favor of vigorous training regimens, but he did once admit that during the 1950’s he enjoyed running along the bridle paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. In addition to helping him to get in shape for the French title matches, the exercise provided Rose with a rare opportunity actually to earn some money from his chosen sport.

“We found there was plenty of small change lying about on the riding tracks where we used to run,” Rose recalled. “Apparently it used to get jolted out of pockets when people were galloping on horseback. We used to spend a lot of time picking up money.’

It was clear from our recent interview with Lowell Thomas ( AMERICAN HERITAGE , August/September 1980) that he has been everywhere and met everyone during his long career, but we were not prepared to find that he had slipped onto our own pages unnoticed last April. Yet he did. In a “Postscripts to History” item in that issue we told of Mary Gladwin, a World War I nurse, and accompanied her story with a photograph of her and two unidentified soldiers. Mr. Thomas wrote in to point out that he was the man in the middle, and a letter nurse Gladwin wrote to her hometown newspaper in 1918 confirms it. Mr. Thomas, she wrote, was “an interesting guest” who planned “to deliver illustrated lectures … upon his return to the United States.”

Perhaps for the first time in our history, two members of the President’s cabinet attend the same small country church. Contributor John Maass of Philadelphia points out that Secretary of Health and Human Services Richard S. Schweiker and Secretary of Transportation Andrew L. Lewis are both active members of the Central Schwenkfelder Church in Worcester, Pennsylvania. “The Schwenkfelders are one of the smallest denominations in the United States,” he writes.“They have only five churches in southeastern Pennsylvania and 2,748 members.

In “Assassin on Trial” (June/July 1981) author John M. Taylor declared that “it is difficult today to convey the grief and outrage” that greeted the assassination of President James A. Garfield by Guiteau in 1881. For some, however, grief was tempered by the clang of the cash register.

Take, for example, the son of Nathaniel Currier, of the New York printmaking firm of Currier & Ives. Garfield, shot on July 2, died of his wound on September 19; on September 21, Currier’s son wrote to his father to break the good news: “The demand for Garfield pictures is perfectly overwhelming, it surpasses everything. We took twelve hundred and twenty-five dollars in hard cash over the counter today!! We could have sold more but we could not get them.…”

Beginning in October, the finest private collection of nineteenth-century American art will be on view in Washington, D. C.’s National Gallery before moving on to the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It has been assembled by Julian and Jo Ann Ganz of Los Angeles; he is a trustee and chairman of the acquisitions committee at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and together they founded that museum’s American Art Council, a group of local collectors who support museum projects. Clearly, both are important and influential connoisseurs.

Those who occasionally glance at our masthead will have noticed a startling omission. Last issue, for the first time in twenty-seven years, the name of Oliver Jensen, our long-time editor, did not appear there. This was no doing of ours. The fact is, we—and possibly Oliver—would have gotten in trouble with the Feds had we continued to display his name, because he now works for the government. He is ideally suited to his new job—Chief of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress. Indeed, it may not be going too far to say that Oliver helped invent the post, for he understood earlier than most that old photographs were a great deal more than amusing family heirlooms. Long before they had evolved into art objects, Oliver saw their curious power to stir, to explain, and—in the greatest examples—to illuminate a whole era in a single thunderclap of stilled motion. We continue to seek out great pictures.