January 2011

When James Bryce presented his credentials as ambassador from Great Britain to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907, he probably knew more about the nation to which he had been sent than any foreign envoy in Washington before or since. He had made seven trips to the United States, the first in 1870, thirty-seven years before; he had visited every state from coast to coast; he had studied the federal constitutions and those of all the states; he had made himself an expert on Congress, on the state legislatures, on the judiciary, and on the party system; and he had extensively interviewed hundreds of American citizens. His classic work, The American Commonwealth, had been first published in 1888 and thereafter reissued again and again to thousands of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Bryce was considered an expert on American affairs even in the United States, and his work was taught in schools and colleges here until it was finally out of date. His friend, Theodore Roosevelt, felt about him as did his sovereign, Queen Victoria, whom he once had accompanied on an Italian vacation as minister in attendance.

Theodore Roosevelt and the politics of personality…

In an age in which most of the world had never even heard the term “charisma,” T.R.—ebullient, vigorous, articulate—was the living definition of the word. In a witty and provocative essay, Edmund Morris (whose The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the Pulitzer prize for biography in 1980) gives us a telling glimpse of a President who loved his job and was “so good at it that the … people loved him for loving it.”

The promise and the peril…

During the early summer of the year 1213 Saint Martin of Finojosa was an old man and not in the best of health. Nevertheless, at the age of seventy-three the saintly bishop and abbot left his beloved Burgos for a long and taxing trip to visit a tiny new monastery on a hilltop near the Tagus River. Like all Cistercian monasteries, it was named for the Virgin Mary—in this case, Santa Maria de Ovila.

It was raining. A forty-four-year-old man named Joseph Knowles gingerly entered an old logging road in the Dead River country of Maine. He was nearly naked and carried no tools, weapons, or equipment of any sort, not even a bottle of mosquito repellent.

The time was August, 1913, the exploit designed to demonstrate that modern man could make out as well in the wilds as our primitive ancestors. Joe Knowles vowed that he would return to civilization in a couple of months healthy, happy, well nourished, and clothed in a bearskin. The idea was inspired by daydreams Knowles had had, or if one accepts a more down-to-earth account, it developed in a Boston saloon between Knowles, a part-time artist who was somewhat vain about his musculature and woodsmanship, and Michael McKeogh, a freelance newspaperman. McKeogh had read Robinson Crusoe and suddenly, possibly recalling Crusoe’s man, Friday, began to think enthusiastically about such matters as “Tuesday: kills bear” and money.

The time was the spring of 1945, as the war in Europe was ending. And the mission was war-related: to assess how effective America’s bombing had been in defeating Germany. Now, John Kenneth Galbraith recalls for the first time the whole experience—how he and his most unmilitary staff of economists operated, how they reacted to the defeated Nazis and to their destroyed country, how they ferreted and schemed and improvised to dig out the facts of Germany’s wartime economy, and how, in the end, our government reacted to their findings.

Galbraith—economist, teacher, critic, novelist, diplomat, adviser to Presidents—has written his memoirs, A Life in Our Times, which will be published by Houghton Mifflin Company in May. The following article is excerpted from this forthcoming book.

In the dead center of the long, rectangular island of Manhattan—New York to most people—sits a long rectangle of parkland known appropriately enough as Central Park. On a quiet Saturday morning in springtime, when the automobiles are banned from its drives, it seems wonderfully at odds with the surrounding city. It pits rolling meadows against the city’s sharp angles, green life against brick and black asphalt, winding paths against the unbending streets of New York’s remorseless grid, into which it has been squeezed as if in a vise. On such a favorable morning Central Park resembles nothing so much as a small, defenseless principality surrounded by a predatory empire, hostile to its spirit, covetous of its green fields, yet miraculously surviving nonetheless—a sort of municipal Liechtenstein.

To Vaux and Olmsted the entire park, with its crags and cascades and meadows, was a single work of art, minutely planned and painstakingly executed. So it is particularly fitting that a nonprofit group called the Central Park Conservancy chose to raise funds by mounting an exhibition of paintings of the park from its beginnings to the present day. Most of the pictures in this portfolio have been drawn from that show, which was held at New York’s Hirschl & Adler Galleries last spring.

You all know our eagle. It was copied from an original wood carving in the collection of Old Sturbridge Village and it’s been flying bravely at the top of each issue since I was playing cowboys and Indians on the south side of Chicago. A few years back we started selling handsome, hand-carved reproductions of it. We have a big stock of these eagles on hand, and the other day our president, Samuel Reed, asked me to find out about the prototype’s history so that the catalogue department could get out some brisk new brochure copy on it.

We’ve always called it the Louisburg eagle. It’s obviously nineteenth century, so it couldn’t have had anything to do with the William Pepperell or Jeffrey Amherst expeditions against that great French fortress in the mid-1700’s. Surely a phone call to Sturbridge would set us straight.

Not at all.

As the introduction to “Explosion in the Magic Valley” (page 26 of this issue) suggests, the concept of the small, freeholding family farm was, through most of the nineteenth century, considered one of the bulwarks of democracy, an expression of the essentially independent American spirit, a wedding between man and land that enriched the national inheritance. “Pioneers,” Henry Clay wrote in 1842, “penetrate into the uninhabited regions of the West. They apply the axe to the forest, which falls before them, or the plough to the prairie, deeply sinking its share in the unbroken wild grasses in which it abounds. They build homes, plant orchards, enclose fields, cultivate the earth, and rear up families around them.”

If the Strait of Malacca had been in the Mediterranean, Maxwell Davenport Taylor might well have become a famous—and habitually seasick—American admiral. That three-thousand-mile error on the entrance examination to Annapolis launched Taylor instead on a brilliant career as an Army officer, in both World War II and Korea, and later as a statesman, diplomat, and presidential adviser. He was born August 26,1901, in Keytesville, Missouri, and spent many childhood hours listening to the Civil War memories of his maternal grandfather, a one-armed former Confederate sergeant.

Geography betrayed him on his Annapolis exam, but he did splendidly at West Point, graduating fourth in a class of 102, in 1922. He received his diploma from Superintendent Douglas MacArthur, who had made the cadet a lifelong nonsmoker by legalizing tobacco at the academy, which “took the fun out of the game.” The new second lieutenant of engineers served in a drab, unexhilarating Army that was supposed to have been rendered obsolete by the war to end all wars.