January 2011

As Richard Rhodes points out in this article, Robert H. Goddard’s attempt to produce a workable rocket propelled by a series of controlled explosions failed and he went on to devise the liquid-fuel system that became the basis for most of his subsequent work.

Yet the concept of a “machine-gun” rocket did not die with Goddard in 1945. In the academic year of 1958-59 the physicist Freeman Dyson became involved with Theodore B. Taylor and other scientists on Project Orion at Point Loma, California, aimed at developing a spaceship powered by small, controlled nuclear explosions. Dyson telk the story in his recent memoir, Disturbing the Universe:

The roller skate was born centuries ago in Europe when small boys tied wooden spools to their shoes. An eighteenth-century Belgian showman named Joseph Merlin is said to have fashioned the first metal-wheeled skates, though he never entirely mastered them: once, while simultaneously skating and playing the violin for a London party he “impelled himself against a mirror … and wounded himself most severely.” But it was an American, James L. Plimpton, who, in 1863, patented the first modern-style skates with two parallel sets of rollers, allowing the wearer to change direction with all four wheels on the ground. It was Plimpton, too, who opened the first public rink, at Newport, in 1866. Soon, every fair-sized city had one, where whole families whirled together to waltzes while bolder couples performed special acrobatic dances such as “On to Richmond” and “The Philadelphia Twist.” The fad has never really faded since. These enthusiastic lyrics and the hand-tinted lantern slides of a cavernous Manhattan rink that accompany them celebrated one of roller skating’s perennial revivals—that of 1907.

In 1901, just after Christmas, in Worcester, Massachusetts, a sickly nineteen-year-old high school student named Robert Hutchings Goddard sat down to compose an essay on an enterprise of surpassing technological challenge. He was no stranger to enterprise. He had already tried to fly an aluminum-foil balloon filled with hydrogen gas and attempted to build a perpetual-motion machine. Samuel P. Langley, aeronautical pioneer and Smithsonian Institution secretary, had asserted in print that birds turn in flight by beating one wing faster than the other; skeptical, Goddard had observed closely the banking flight of chimney swifts and written to a popular magazine to correct the distinguished physicist’s error. The enterprise that challenged Goddard now, that had fired his dreaming for more than two years, was space travel. He titled his essay “The Navigation of Space.” Concisely, unemotionally, it defined his life’s work.

Lowell Thomas …

In an exclusive interview with former AMERICAN HERITAGE editor Robert Gallagher, “the stranger everyone knows” talks vividly about a career that has spanned more than sixty years, includes fifty-six books and thousands of radio broadcasts, and has taken Thomas to almost every region on earth. Now in his ninth decade, has he decided to slow down? Not a bit of it. “What I would really like to do,” he says, “is visit an inhabited planet, similar to our own. …”

Bobby Jones …

Fifty years ago, the first great champion of American golf won the Grand Slam—the British Amateur, the British Open, the U.S. Open, and the U.S. Amateur—which no one had ever done before and no one is likely to do again. Red Smith, the dean of American sportswriters, offers a lively account of Jones’s career and the history of his game in this country.

Reliance …

Presidential campaigns generally leave in their wake all sorts of debris—abandoned buttons, discarded straw hats, ripped and soiled bunting, forgotten promises. The Bryan-McKinley campaign of 1896—described by Louis W. Koenig in “The First Hurrah” (April/May 1980)—was no exception, and among the detritus was a scrapbook of splendid pro-Bryan doggerel written for various newspapers. Nadine Butler, of Madison, Wisconsin, who now owns the scrapbook, was kind enough to pass along some samples.

“The people appear to have entered into the contest with a vigor that would have made their pioneer forebears proud,” she writes. “The evidence is in this scrapbook, yellowed and dry with age. Ida Kegler, among whose papers it was found, seems to have been the young Democrat of eighty-four years ago who clipped and pasted the newspaper accounts. She left no doubt of her political bias.”

Indeed not. Consider, for example, one Tom Russell, who in “Welcome Bryan” waxed wroth over the discrepancy between McKinley’s campaign chest (at least $3,500,000) and that of Bryan (some $300,000):

As a kind of antidote to the inspired doggerel on the opposite page, we thought it might be instructive to offer a few lines from Vachel Lindsay’s “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan: The Campaign of Eighteen Ninety-Six, as Viewed at the Time by a Sixteen-Year-Old, etc.…:

In “The View from Fourth & Olive” (December, 1979), we inadvertently referred to the “St. Louis Historical Society” as the owners of the Easterly daguerreotypes featured in the article. The correct institution, of course, is the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, and we extend our sincere apologies. So far as we know, there is no such thing as a St. Louis Historical Society.

On a more pleasant note, we heard from Vincent P. Lane, a park technician with the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, who pointed out something curious regarding the Easterly photograph on pages 78-79: “In the photograph there is a steamboat which bears the name Federal Arch. Isn’t it ironic that this steamboat was photographed where later there would be another federal arch—that is, the Gateway Arch of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial?” Indeed, the splendid Gateway Arch does span most of what once was the busy St. Louis waterfront. Reproduced above is a detail from the Easterly daguerreotype showing the Federal Arch .

General James M. Gavin’s “Bloody Huertgen: The Battle That Should Never Have Been Fought” (December, 1979) inspired a letter from Dominic F. O’Donnell of Fairfax, Virginia:

“General Gavin states that the town of Schmidt was taken by the 82nd Airborne Division. This is not true. I was a member of Company K, 3rd Battalion, 310th Infantry, 78th Division, and the 3rd Battalion was the combat unit that attacked and captured the town of Schmidt.… I was there, and remember many events that took place on that memorable occasion. One is that I ran out of bazooka ammunition trying to blow the doors off a concrete bunker blocking our approach to Schmidt. …

Our story of the fiery disaster aboard the General Slocum in 1904 (“The Flames of Hell Gate” by William Peirce Randel, October/November, 1979) has brought us a shared memory from H. L. Goldsmith of Doniphan, Missouri: “I read the article on the General Slocum with a great deal of interest. My father was a member of the Sunday school at St. Mark’s church at the time, aged thirteen, and planned to go on the excursion that day. He came down with an upset stomach, and his oldest sister, with whom he lived, would not allow him out that day. So he lived until 1959. Among his memories were the coffins piled up on the sidewalks in front of the storefront funeral parlors, as high as the second story (first floor). The horror that struck the community these people lived in was such that many of the survivors moved away as soon as possible.”

by W. A. Swanberg Charles Scribner’s Sons 32 pages of photographs 544 pages, $17.50

William C. Whitney and his daughter Dorothy, charter members of Ward McAllister’s Four Hundred, were personally endearing people, whose warmth of personality created a circle of affection around them. Moreover, both of them were intelligent and exceedingly able. But as Swanberg makes clear in this rich dual biography, there the similarity ended.

As a businessman, Whitney was not so savory. He wasn’t quite in the robber-baron class: his arena for larceny—New York’s surface transit system—was too small. But by 1900 he had built himself a considerable fortune by fleecing small investors with watered stock and “wholesale stockjobbery.” His financial schemes were so arcane that few people in his lifetime could fathom their impropriety. And little has turned up since to untangle the mess.