January 2011

A little autobiography is needed. I was born a U.S. citizen, in Lenox, Massachusetts, to be precise, and educated in France and England. I therefore speak French with a French accent and English with an English one. Now this is not allowed of Americans. An American can quite legitimately speak with a Latvian, Korean, Irish, German, Italian, or Greek accent and no one cares, you are an okay American. But if you speak with an English one, people ask if you are “really” American. I used to find this irritating, particularly when I was an officer in the Army of the United States.

In 1939 I volunteered for the British forces. On December 8,1941, I applied for a transfer to those of the United States. By late ’42 I was working, as a lieutenant, in military intelligence (German Order of Battle) at the War Office, after having been through the general British I. school and the more specialized interrogation school at Cambridge.

In the early summer of 1872, Kiowa or Comanche Indians killed and scalped two white ranchers to steal their sixteen-shot Henry rifles. The Indians spared one man’s Mexican wife and a servant boy, and the survivors reported the murders to the authorities at Fort Bascom, New Mexico. The U.S. Army, including the 8th Cavalry, Colonel John Irvin Gregg commanding, was bugled off on a punitive expedition into the Staked Plains of West Texas, the homeland of the warlike tribesmen.

Colonel Gregg’s impressive Civil War record, for which he had received brevet promotions to brigadier general, U.S.A., and major general, U.S. Volunteers, had ended with his capture by weary Confederates only three days before Appomattox. His subsequent knack for getting lost is reflected in the journal kept by William Edward Matthews, one of his troopers, and a rather jaundiced observer of military life.

The officer commanding fires the barn. The dry wood takes quickly; the soldiers can see a man thrashing about inside. They are under orders not to fire on him, to take him alive. But among them is a cavalry sergeant who is not listening to the officers. He is listening to God. As the fire grows, Boston Corbett either raises—or doesn’t raise—his pistol and shoots—or doesn’t shoot—John Wilkes Booth.

It is an opening scene cherished by Jules Verne devotees: October 2, 1872, London’s exclusive Reform Club, the daily whist game in the reading room, then the famous wager—around the world within eighty days for a stake of twenty thousand pounds sterling.

Two hours later Phileas Fogg, “gentleman of honour,” and the faithful Passepartout are on the boat train to Dover. Precisely eighty days and many pages later, after an adventurous transit by train, by steamship, by elephant, by snow sledge, Fogg strides into the Reform to claim the bet and the triumph.

Disheveled, distrait, and bone-tired, a dazzingly beautiful woman sat in the Paris residence of her American dentist, Thomas W. Evans. She did not have a dental appointment; the doctor, in fact, was not there. What she sought was sanctuary from the hatreds accompanying a revolution.

The lady was Eugénie, Empress of the French, Regent, and wife of Napoleon III. With her as she sat uneasily in Dr. Evans’ library was a faithful member of her Court, Madame Lebreton. The latter, through the good offices of a twenty-franc note, had gained entry to the mansion without disclosing their identities.

Time dragged. As the sun dropped toward the horizon on that historic day, September 4, 1870, when the Second Empire collapsed, Eugénie had good reason to review anxiously how she would be received by the doctor. He was, after all, a foreigner with perhaps even less inclination to take grave personal risks in her behalf than many high French personages who had already abandoned her.

The person in the cherry picker is giving an odd sort of truth to Walter Pater’s definition of art: “All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage. ” For Phoebe Dent Weil is removing surplusage from the statue of Saint Louis that resides in Forest Park, St. Louis, just as she would like to see done to all the statues and monuments that stand in the parks, plazas, squares, and civic centers of nearly every city in the nation.

For the past year and a half, Robert H. Ferrell, a diplomatic historian at Indiana University, has been at work among President Harry S. Truman’s newly opened private papers at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Early last year, working with Erwin J. Mueller, an extraordinarily able library archivist, he uncovered a hitherto unknown personal journal kept sporadically by the President during the 1945 Big Three Conference at Potsdam, Germany. Scribbled on miscellaneous scraps of paper—White House stationery, lined sheets from a tablet, note paper picked up aboard the U.S.S. Augusta, the cruiser that took Truman to Europe—it is reproduced here for the first time and in its entirety.

They don’t look like much.

Housed in some tired cardboard boxes and old wooden cases in a back room of the Smithsonian Institution are sixty-two metal plates. Most are about 8½ × 6½ inches. They are photographs, copies of tinted engravings, and their surfaces present a slightly enameled appearance with muted colors. A visitor coming across them would be unlikely to give them a second glance; far more beautiful and compelling photographs are everywhere in the Smithsonian’s collection. But these plates have a significance beyond their physical appearance: they are the only remaining evidence of one of America’s strangest controversies. And they are, quite possibly, the world’s first color photographs.

Not long ago a national women’s magazine loftily announced that it would no longer consider any unsolicited manuscripts. This caused a certain amount of bemusement around our offices; for, like Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, AMERICAN HERITAGE has always depended on the kindness of strangers. Although most of our articles are commissioned, some of the finest come in over the transom—the publishing industry’s curiously old-fashioned phrase for the arrival of a piece that has not been solicited.