January 2011

In a caption on page 19 of our June/July, 1979, issue we said that Millard Fillmore ran for the Presidency in 1856, “just three years after leaving the White House as a Democrat.” Robert O. McNiel of Roanoke, Virginia, brings us to heel: “This is totally incorrect. Fillmore ran for Vice-President with Zachary Taylor on the Whig ticket. When Taylor died in office, Fillmore succeeded him. He was, of course, a Whig—not a Democrat ever.” Mr. McNiel is dead right. Fillmore, a staunch conservative who had come to his Whig persuasion under the tutelage of none other than Thurlow Weed, would have been appalled.

In that same issue, we presented a little story (“Head Lines”) concerning a gadget once used to measure a man’s head for hat fitting; it brought forth an addendum from Edward C. Brummer of Jaffrey, New Hampshire: “As an additional and very simple method of meeting the problem, I would like to describe the tactic used by my father and uncle in their clothing store in Lisbon, New Hampshire, many years ago.

In “Shades of Rebellion” (June/July, 1979) we presented a charming trio of lifelike silhouettes done at the time of the Revolutionary War. One of the silhouettes (shown here) portrayed Major Hugh Maxwell. “We have no details of Maxwell’s service,” we noted.

We do now. Reader Frederic D. H. Gilbert of Briarcliff Manor, New York, has written to give us the outline of a long and meritorious career: “Born in the north of Ireland of staunch Presbyterian parents, Maxwell was brought to America as an infant. As a young man, he served in the French and Indian War, and in 1773, with a wife and five children, he settled in Heath, then part of the town of Charlemont in northwestern Massachusetts.…

Reader William F. Hamilton of Lakewood, Ohio, recently wrote to author Paul Engle and was kind enough to give us a copy of his letter. Portions of it follow:

The reopening of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing this spring deserves the great attention it is likely to get. During the several years that the Wing has been closed for rehabilitation and for new construction that will more than double the size of the old premises, most of the museum’s collections of American art have been in storage. But even in such confinement they continued to grow in size, scope, and importance. When the new construction is finally completed, it will house what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive and representative assemblage of American arts and crafts to be found anywhere under one roof. Here will be seen outstanding examples in every medium and from all periods of this country’s history —painting, sculpture, architecture, prints and drawings, and decorative arts of numerous kinds.

It is hard to imagine a task more difficult than to convey in a single article a sense of the American Wing’s near-infinite holdings. We could, on the twelve pages allotted, have run several hundred postage-stamp-size images, an awesomely tedious—and still inadequate—solution. Would it be possible, we wondered in some desperation, to choose a representative handful of superb objects and paintings, each a unique and superlative example of its kind?

Possible, perhaps, but certainly not for any of us. And so we turned to a man ideally suited to this maddening task.

by Malcolm Cowley Viking Press Photographs, 352 pages, $14.95

Exile’s Return , Malcolm Cowley’s important memoir about the literary expatriates of the 1920’s was first published forty-six years ago. Now, after a long career as critic, essayist, and poet, Cowley picks up where he left off to tell us how he and his generation of writers responded to the bleak, scary early years of the 1930’s.

Writers are not easy joiners, but in a world that seemed to be dying, with no work to be had and people’s precious savings entombed in closed banks, Communism seemed to many of them the only source of hope. Cowley says: “By surrendering their middle-class identities, by joining the workers in an idealized army, writers might help to overthrow ‘the system’ and might go marching… out of injustice and illogic into the golden mountains.”

by Charles Ackers Little, Brown and Company 207 pages, $9.95

In reviewing this new biography of Abigail Adams—the first written since the Adams-family manuscripts were opened to scholars—it is tempting simply to quote that pungent and original lady. “My pen is always freer than my tongue,” she wrote her husband in one of the two thousand surviving letters on which this book is based, and indeed she was a candid correspondent.

Her much-quoted admonition to John to “Remember the Ladies” was accompanied by the sharper statement: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” In their long, loving marriage she always made it clear, in private if not in public, that she considered herself John’s equal. “If man is Lord,” she wrote, “woman is Lordess.” Her political judgments could be equally pointed. She wrote that John Hancock, whom she considered an untrustworthy lightweight, was a “tinkleling cymball,” and she noted that “Patriotism in the female Sex is the most disinterested of all virtues.”

by William H. Chafe Oxford University Press Photographs, 436 pages, $13.95

The history of the civil rights movement, William Chafe says, has been told mostly in terms of its highlights—Brown vs. the Board of Education, Little Rock, Selma, et cetera. In his new book he focuses instead on the attitudes and changes in one Southern city over a period of thirty years—1945 to 1975. His city is Greensboro, North Carolina, where four scared college students sat down at the lunch counter of the local Woolworth’s on February 1, 1960, asked to be served, and stayed sitting when they were refused.

BRIM TRIMS TIMOTHY REDUX

These little girls, all ready to celebrate Easter, 1898, serve to remind us of what a remarkably durable thing the traditional Easter bonnet could be. Mary Malone, of Trenton, New Jersey, writes: “The hats were kept from year to year, and freshly trimmed each Easter, so that the girls emerged on Easter Sunday with a brimful of new flowers and ribbons. My mother, the smallest in the group, was five when this picture was taken.”