January 2011

Ann Rutledge, according to the full-blown legend, was Abraham Lincoln’s first and only true love, forever closest to his heart. Her death in 1835 filled him with youthful despair verging on madness and drove him into the political career that made him ready, when the time came, to save the American nation. Thus, in the poem by Edgar Lee Masters, she lays claim to a place in history, exclaiming: “Bloom forever, O Republic,/From the dust of my bosom!” In the 1920’s this luxuriant sentimentalism found more favor with the general public than it did with Lincoln scholars, some of whom were disposed to prune the legend severely. The whole story, after all, rested entirely on reminiscences gathered after Lincoln’s death by his law partner, William H. Herndon. It had no basis in contemporary records, no documentary existence as a historical event. Such was the uncertain status of the Ann Rutledge legend in late June or early July 1928, when the Atlantic Monthly received its first letter from Wilma Frances Minor of San Diego.

The Red Cross “shall constitute a bulwark against the mighty woes sure to come sooner or later to all people and all nations,” said Clara Barton in 1904, toward the end of her stewardship of the durable institution she had organized in 1881. After nursing and ministering to soldiers during the Civil War, she visited the Continent and became involved with its European predecessor, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had been founded at Geneva in 1863 to aid all victims of war. She returned home to found the American Association of the Red Cross, which she headed for twenty-three years.

Sure you’re romantic about American history … it is the most romantic of all histories. It began as myth and has developed through three centuries of fairy stories. Whatever the time is in America it is always, at every moment, the mad and wayward hour when the prince is finding the little foot that alone fits into the slipper of glass.… Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by chaos out of dream, it began as dream and has continued as dream down to the last headline you read in a newspaper.… The simplest truth you can ever write about our history will be charged and surcharged with romanticism, and if you are afraid of the word you had better start practicing seriously on your fiddle.

—Bernard DeVoto to Catherine Drinker Bowen

In his Civil War epic John Brown’s Body , Stephen Vincent Benét says that General Halleck was “Called ‘Old Brains,’ for reasons that history/ Still tries to fathom. …” It’s just not true. Benêt knew why Halleck had that nickname. But scrupulously fair as he was to the memory of all the other officers of the war, North and South, he could not resist that swipe. He didn’t like Halleck any better than anyone else did.

In 1899 when I was five years old and living in Palmetto, Florida, my father decided to take his family through the wilds of the Everglades and stake a claim on an offshore island. His purpose was to farm this island but behind this was his wish to give us a taste of the way he grew up. He had been a cowboy in the Myakka area when he was fifteen years old. These ranchlands overlapped the north end of the Everglades at a time when it was unexplored. As long as he lived, papa liked his corn bread made campfire style with boiling water and salt only, and flattened out into a brittle, tasty cracker.

The past has a way of catching up to us in odd and unexpected ways. A friend of mine was once walking the streets of Venice and encountered the smell of sausages cooking somewhere. The aroma immediately aroused in her rich Venetian memories—not of Venice, Italy, but of Venice, California, the seaside resort where she had spent many childhood summers half a century before, basking in the sun and eating hot sausages bought from street vendors.

The photographs on these pages document a different kind of historical trigger mechanism—and in this case, the memories evoked are as much national as personal. Even for those of us who did not grow up in the Depression years, the buildings shown here tap a Sargasso Sea of memory, of Cole Porter songs and Ernst Lubitsch movie comedies, of Benny Goodman and the Big Bands, of streamliners and ocean liners—of an age that attempted to use style to escape the substance of a world apparently gone mad.

Early in the afternoon of December 4, 1872, at a point about midway between the Azores and Portugal, the Nova Scotian brigantine Dei Gratia was proceeding on a southeasterly course when her master, David Reed Morehouse, sighted a sailing ship on his port bow, to windward. Through a glass he perceived that she was another brigantine, beating northwest under very short canvas. As the gap between the ships narrowed, he was unable to make out any people on the stranger. He ordered a boat lowered and sent first mate Oliver Deveau, with second mate John Wright and a seaman, to investigate.

During a driving rain, the American infantry company worked its way toward a German strong point rmi the outskirts of Cherbourg. Rifle and machinegun fire echoed through the deserted streets, and shells passed overhead with rustling noises before exploding. Riflemen edged along both sides of a narrow, winding street, now darting forward, now crouching beside a wall or ducking into a doorway. They halted when they came up behind two American tanks training their guns on a German pillbox. The lead tank opened up with its 75-millimeter cannon, and the blasts reverberated thunderously among the buildings. Then a yellow flame—a German shell—pierced the tank, and the crew came tumbling out of the turret. The men raced for a nearby doorway and plunged through it.

In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Captain Henry T. Waskow, of Belton, Texas.

Captain Waskow was a company commander in the Thirty-sixth Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and a gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

“After my father, he came next,” a sergeant told me.

“He always looked after us,” a soldier said. “He’d go to bat for us every time.”

“I’ve never known him to do anything unfair,” another said.

I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Captain Waskow down. The moon was nearly full, and you could see far up the trail, and even partway across the valley below.