January 2011

Red Smith’s profile of Bobby Jones (“Four!”) in our August/September 1980 issue included the statement that “no organization devoted exclusively to golf existed in this country before November 14,1888, when the St. Andrew’s Golf Club was formed at a dinner in John Reid’s home in Yonkers, New York.”

Not so, writes one of our readers, Edward Owen Perry of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: “That distinction belongs to the Foxburg Golf Club of Foxburg, Pennsylvania, which was founded, opened, and used in 1887 and is still used. It is a golf club exclusively, and always has been.”

ON THE (PRE-IMPERIAL) PRESIDENCY

Seated in his study in a pleasant brick house only minutes away from the Yale campus, where he is Professor Emeritus of History, C. Vann Woodward is so soft-spoken and understated that it is easy to forget, momentarily, the position he occupies in his profession. At least five major boohs published since 1938— Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel; Reunion and Reaction; Origins of the New South, 1877-1913; The Strange Career of Jim Crow; The Burden of Southern History —have established him as the unchallenged leader among historians of the American South, and they represent only a portion of his total work. His many honors include the past presidencies of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. He has taught and lectured at colleges far and wide, large and small, including a year as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford.

Everyone knows that the age of photography was born in France when Louis Daguerre developed a way to fix sunlight on a plate. Not quite so familiar, however, is the fact that Daguerre’s first attempts required nearly as much time to record a scene as an artist would have needed to paint it. It took two ingenious Philadelphians to perfect the process to a point where it could record a human face—and the remarkable picture on the opposite page documents their triumph.

It was like any other Tuesday lunch hour, until the sheriff’s deputies walked in. Mr. Ernest Bamberger, general manager of the Keystone Mining Company and recent (unsuccessful) Republican candidate for United States senator, and Mr. John C. Lynch, manager of the Salt Lake Ice Company, finished their meals at the Vienna Café, an unpretentious but respectable businessmen’s restaurant on Salt Lake City’s Main Street, and prepared to savor their customary post-luncheon cigars. A few tables away, near the back of the crowded establishment, Mr. Edgar L. Newhouse, department manager for the American Smelting and Refining Company, paused briefly in his conversation with Mr. L. R. Eccles of Ogden to light a cigarette. At the same time, Mr. Ambrose Noble McKay, general manager of the Salt Lake Tribune, lighted his cigar, picked up his check, and went over to the counter to pay it.

Memories of war and peace …

In an exclusive interview, General Maxwell D. Taylor looks back on half a century of service to his country as soldier, diplomat, and presidential adviser. He ranges widely, from his tour of duty in pre-war Japan (where he secretly compiled a combat handbook that served us well in World War II), through the controversial airdrop at Arnhem (”it might have been even more disastrous had we been successful”), to the behind-the-scenes diplomatic struggle of the Vietnam years (”… since Vietnam was lost, as we allowed it to be lost, everything has gone downhill …”).

“A world which knows the sun” …

That’s what thirty-two-year-old James Bryce felt he had found when he visited the United States for the first time in 1870. He returned again and again during his long life, irresistibly drawn by “this new world.” As Louis Auchincloss, the well-known novelist, makes clear, this shrewd Englishman became one of the most engaging and perceptive of all the foreign visitors who have chronicled our dreams and foibles.

Until recently the history of the American West has been dominated by the elite, the spectacular, and the gaudy, not by the ordinary folk—the “little people with dirty faces,” who are only now beginning to get their due. The same generally has been true of canine history. Where dogs have been mentioned in the winning of the West, they have for the most part been the glamourous, highly trumpeted few: the intrepid Newfoundland explorer, Scannon, who sniffed his way to the Pacific with Lewis and Clark; San Francisco’s early favorites, dudes at that, Lazarus and Bummer; or Balto, the Northern sled dog who carried diptheria serum to Nome in 1925. Unsung are the average dogs of Western America who faithfully followed their masters and mistresses on the Overland Trails, sometimes limping, coats unkempt, with noses eagerly testing the breeze.

Benjamin Franklin wrote what could be called America s first self-improvement manual. But Franklin trod the world stage, and his autobiography is a classic expression of Enlightenment ideals, too grand a thing to count Dale Carnegie’s books among its offspring. The true father of Carnegie, or of Norman Vincent Peale, was Mason Weems (1759–1825), the itinerant preacher and bibliopolist—he had the salesman’s trick of dignifying his trade with fancy names.

Though Weems is best known for his life of Washington, he also wrote popular biographies of Franklin himself, of William Penn, and of General Francis Marion. He also wrote, published, and peddled moral tracts, sermons tricked out as entertainments—the equivalent of Bishop Fulton Sheen s television shows in the 1950’s.

For thirty-one years Parson Weems served as an agent for the Philadelphia publisher, Mathew Carey, hauling his cartful of improving works up and down the eastern seaboard from New York to Savannah. They were a distinctly odd couple—Weems, the Episcopal clergyman, and Carey the Irish Catholic immigrant—and their relationship was characterized by truly eloquent vituperation from both sides. Here is a selection of complaints and entreaties from Weems in the field to Carey in the home office on subjects still familiar to anyone engaged in the making and selling of books: marketing, binding, shipping, pricing, even the extreme difficulty of getting the right celebrities to endorse the product.