The history of the American labor movement has more than its share of fascinating stories, but not many of them are tinged with the supernatural (Joe Hill really did die, after all). But now Bryan Miller, a former Associated Press reporter, passes along the following Gothic tale: “While touring the eastern Pennsylvania town of Jim Thorpe, a photographer friend and I encountered rumors about its ‘famous’ Carbon County jail and the ‘amazing’ phenomenon inside. As we poked around further, local folks repeated the legend with varying degrees of authority, although no one could verify it empirically.
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January 2011
FDR, CLOSE UP…
January 30, 1982, marks the centennial of the birth of an American colossus. Possessed of limitless energy and indefatigable charm, Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed to his countrymen the most accessible of Presidents. But in fact he was so closed and private that even his closest aides admitted he remained an enigma to them, and one wrote that FDR played his cards so close to his vest that he “put every possible obstacle” in the way of future biographers. Fortunately, this was only partly correct, and in our next issue we draw upon a hitherto unknown cache of material to present a uniquely intimate .portrait of FDR, the chief executive—jaunty, shrewd, passionate, amused and amusing, and always in command.
Opening to the East…
Editor's Note: December, 1918; the war was over. There was special reason for cheer that Christmas, particularly for those who had done the fighting, even for those who had been cut down and now waited for their wounds to heal in France before returning home. It shines through the following letter, written on January 10, 1919, from a hospital in Mesves, France, and recently discovered by Rita Cheronis of Deerfield, Illinois, who was kind enough to pass it along to us. The writer is Lieutenant Angélus T. Burch and the letter is addressed to his family in Kansas. Burch went on to become a journalist and at one time was associate editor of the Chicago Daily News. It would be nice to imagine that this engaging young man ended up marrying “The Light of Heaven.” But he didn’t.
Dearly Beloveds:
In 1950 a biographer of the elderly Bernarr Macfadden—who by then was known primarily as an octogenarian health fanatic who took a parachute jump each year on his birthday—remarked that his subject’s boyhood adventures bore “a stunning resemblance to the pulp fiction of the period.” That is true but not surprising. Macfadden’s imagination always contained a healthy admixture of pulp; otherwise he could not have invented the confession magazine—“the first new idea in the publishing field in the last fifty years,” according to one contemporary authority—or have made so much money from it. And virtually all that is known about his life before 1893, when he arrived in New York City, comes either directly from him or from one of his worshipful authorized biographers. Unlike George Washington, who was posthumously served by Parson Weems, Macfadden mythicized himself.
My husband, David Gurewitsch, was the personal physician of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt from the White House years until her death in 1962. On a 1947 flight to Switzerland, when Mrs. Roosevelt was en route to Geneva as chairman of the United States Commission on Human Rights and Dr. Gurewitsch was going as a patient to a tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos, the professional relationship between doctor and patient changed into a unique friendship. Fog and engine trouble caused days of delay in Newfoundland and Shannon. This gave them secluded time in which to learn about each other and was the start of exchanges of confidence, advice, and mutual trust upon which each grew to depend. Mrs. Roosevelt later referred to her friendship with David as “more meaningful than I have ever had” Her almost daily letters to him during his year in Switzerland began an exceptional correspondence. They had much in common. No matter how well they traversed the prescribed routes of life, each, for different reasons, felt outside the mainstream. Both were essentially lonely, highly intuitive, brilliant, and motivated by public service, and both had wide interests .
The Japanese planes that came screaming down on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, changed the whole course of history. The United States was plunged into a long, grueling war. But more than that, the lives of most Americans were to be altered radically not just for the duration of the war, but forever.
Looking back after forty years, Pearl Harbor stands out as a moment of high drama—a turning point in history for the United States and the world. Things were never to be the same again. History has become divided by a clear prewar and postwar line of cleavage. This had happened to Europe in World War I. Now it was happening to the United States and the rest of the world, with Pearl Harbor the moment of sharpest transition.
James MacGregor Burns describes himself as a “part-time politician.” He has earned the title by serving as a delegate to four Democratic National Conventions, by membership on two commissions to revise Democratic party charters, and by a run for Congress in 1958. He is also a professor of political science at Williams College, from which he was graduated in 1939. Since 1949 he has written eight widely known books on the men and the forces that shape American government. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox won acclaim when published in 1956. Its sequel, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom , took the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1971. He has managed also to write many articles on matters of statecraft, to be coauthor of a textbook on American government, and to win a term as president of the American Political Science Association.