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.
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During the very brief era that ore and lumber made Hurley one of the larger towns in Wisconsin, its founder and booster John H. Burton built there the finest hotel in the state. “The Hotel With a Thousand Windows” cost $100,000 to build in 1886. The owner advertised the usual Victorian statistics: 100 rooms, a 216-foot promenade veranda, a basement bowling alley, walnut wainscoting, a “reading room with washroom attached.” The traditional peril of all frame hotels overtook the Bardon—as it was then called—on May 19, 1894, when fire broke out on the fourth floor. As this picture of the event indicates, the Hurley citizenry conducted rescue operations with admirable phlegm, but nobody was more self-possessed that day than young Arnold Alexander, the photographer. At the first alarm, Arnold, the teenaged son of the proprietor, fetched his camera and set it up on the wooden sidewalk. Aided by his brother Lake, he took this crisp view of the blaze (that’s Lake providing some perspective at the lower right).
by Leonard Mosley Atheneum 32 photographs, 448 pages, $15.00
It is hard to read the history of America since 1800 without running into du Ponts. The first patriarch helped Jefferson negotiate the Louisiana Purchase; generations later, du Ponts designed the first secret atomic plants in World War II. The family business has provided gunpowder of increasing sophistication for all of America’s wars from 1812 on, and Du Pont chemists have produced dozens of items as indispensable in our lives as cellophane and nylon.
That we know less about individual du Ponts than about Rockefellers or Vanderbilts, Mosley says in this highly entertaining history of the dynasty, is because self-appointed family archivists and the company’s “tight-lipped public relations men” have for years sanitized the record. Only recently have scholars been permitted to poke around in family papers.
A President’s secret diary…
from the pages of a scrappy informal journal, kept by Harry Truman at the 1945 Potsdam Conference, and published in AMERICAN HERITAGE for the first time, we learn what the Man from Missouri really thought of the fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, of Winston Churchill—“I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t give me too much soft soap”—and of Joseph Stalin—“I liked the little son of a bitch.” Professor Robert Ferrell provides the necessary background.
Fire in the sky…
in “God Pity a One-Dream Man” Richard Rhodes examines the complex and visionary career of Robert H. Goddard—the father of modern rocketry and a dreamer of no small dimensions. Goddard’s hope, Rhodes reminds us, was nothing less than to save the human race from extinction.
Tracks in the wilderness…
We have long since stopped gawking at the Shakers and ridiculing the things they made, and there are now seven major museums devoted exclusively to what we now see as their solid, handsome .buildings and their exquisitely simple furnishings:
CANTERBURY SHAKER MUSEUM , East Canterbury, New Hampshire, 03224. An original Shaker village founded in 1792, still occupied by Shaker Sisters. Tel. (603) 783-9822
FRUITLANDS MUSEUMS , Harvard, Massachusetts 01451. One of five museums on the grounds. Tel. (617) 456-3924
HANCOCK SHAKER COMMUNITY, INC. , Massachusetts 01201. A former Shaker village, now under restoration. Seventeen original buildings, including the Round Barn. Tel. (413) 443-0188
SHAKER MUSEUM , Old Chatham, New York 12136. Oldest and largest of the museums devoted to Shaker crafts. Tel. (518) 794-9105
“I had come to visit the people in that quiet Shaker village upon the mountain terrace,” Benson John Lossing wrote in August of 1856. This prolific author and illustrator, best remembered for his monumental Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution , planned to write an article about the New Lebanon community for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine . His sympathetic account, illustrated with engravings based upon the watercolors in the following portfolio, appeared the following year. Lossing was not among the scoffers. “Order and Neatness there held high court with a majesty I had never before seen,” he wrote. “The very dust in the road seemed pure. …” His descriptions and paintings of Shaker industry, customs, and worship were both exact and respectful. “Whatever may have been the scenes among the Shakers … of which many have spoken with contempt and ridicule, it can not be denied that their public worship at Lebanon is dignified, solemn and deeply impressive.” He was, he continued, “filled with new emotions, for I was in the midst of social and religious novelties.
Few men have looked more like what they were than William Aloysius Brady. The canny figure on the opposite page, comfortable in the insolent swank of his Broadway suit, could not possibly be a soldier, or an inventor, or a statesman. He could only be a showman.
On his seventy-fifth birthday, in 1938, Brady said he had produced over 260 plays. And along the way he found time to manage wrestlers, bicycle races, a full-scale simulation of a Boer War battle—and two world heavyweight boxing champions. He knew every theatrical figure of his day, fought with a good many of them, and was possessed, according to a contemporary, of “more charm than was right for any one man to have.”