January 2011

Oliver Jensen, who was for many years the editor of this magazine and who worked with Bruce Catton from its first publication in 1954, has written this account of what it was like to have him as a colleague. We are pleased to run it here as a tribute to our late distinguished senior editor, together with some side comments from others who enjoyed the privilege of “working with Bruce Catton.”

Samuel S. Vaughan, Bruce’s editor at Doubleday for many years: “In preparing to work with him, I was given some advice about editing in general by Ken McCormick, our editor-in-chief. He told me never to write on an author’s manuscript until you had established a real relationship with him—until you trusted each other. Writing on a man’s manuscript, he suggested, was like writing on his skin .

“So in reading my first Catton manuscript, I made only the tiniest, pencil check marks in the margin beside the few sentences that might need another look. My notes themselves I put on a separate tablet of paper. Then I went over to meet the great man in his office at AMERICAN HERITAGE .

“He was extremely cooperative, listened patiently, even respectfully, to some of my suggestions, and in most cases accepted them. But I noticed that before he did anything, he took an eraser and carefully erased the check marks in the margin .

More than a decade ago the phrase “urban crisis” crept into our public conversation. Since then it has become a cliché, connoting a wide range of persistent and dangerous problems confronting our cities. Moreover, the phrase, like “missile crisis” or “energy crisis,” suggests both newness and immediate danger. The rioting, arson, and looting that erupted in the 1960’s fortified this general impression. Presumably something unprecedented had happened. Urban life had become unmanageable; in the professional and popular view, cities were “ungovernable.”

The complex character and the extraordinary capacities of Theodore Roosevelt have attracted biographers and readers ever since his death sixty years ago. But according to Edmund Morris, Roosevelt’spre-presidential career has escaped the full scrutiny of historians. In an absorbing new biography, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Morris helps fill that gap. A Kenyan by birth, Morris is now an American citizen, and this is his first book. It will be published later this month by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. The following excerpt tells the story of the twenty-three-year-old Roosevelt, exploding onto the political stage in his first public role, as a newly elected Republican state assemblyman from New York.

One reason most Americans find greater immediacy in the Civil War than in the Revolution is that the camera came into being during the eighty-odd years between the two conflicts. However skillful his hand, the engraver could not approach the sense of intimacy the lens provides. In the absence of photographic images, the Continental soldiers tend to recede from us, to become one with the defenders of Blenheim, or of Troy.

This process of historical alienation is vividly demonstrated on these pages. Each of these portraits shows a well-known American officer who played a crucial role throughout the Revolutionary War. Can you identify them? Answers appear on page 112.

By the late 1850’s Frederick Church was the most popular artist in America. “He alone,” wrote a contemporary, “with the confidence of success, exhibits his single works as they are completed.” Holding opera glasses, visitors would come to study a solitary canvas —almost always a landscape of enormous complexity, a huge, classical composition crowded with photographic detail. But Church’s admirers never saw the studies he also produced—hasty notations, tossed off in a matter of minutes, but filled with sunlight and greenery and tumbling clouds. Fresh, simple, and direct, they anticipated the work of the impressionists and, to our age, are as appealing as the obsessive intricacy of Church’s more finished works. The examples on the following pages have been culled from a traveling exhibition chosen from some five hundred oil sketches in the collection of New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum by curator Theodore Stebbins of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where the show originated.

The band of heroes on pages 32-33 is made up of George Washington—alone. Every one of these eighteenth-century European engravings was solemnly offered by its publisher as a true representation of the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. The artists either added their own whims to earlier portraits, or summoned what they took to be an imposing military type from imagination alone. Nevertheless, they all insisted that their products were accurate; the brooding Mediterranean figure at the top right of page 33, for instance, was published by C. Shepherd of London, who claimed it was “Drawn from life by Alexr Campbell, of Williamsburgh in Virginia.” Washington said he’d never heard of the man.

Though far from shy about posing, the general was a busy man, and often hard to get to. One resourceful artist named Joseph Wright, having failed to arrange a sitting, was forced to resort to a mild ploy; he inveigled a seat in the pew opposite Washington’s in St. Paul’s Church in New York and, working unobtrusively, produced the profile below, which served as a point of departure for several more fanciful European likenesses.

In W. S. Kuniczak’s “Polonia: The Face of Poland in America” (April/May, 1978), the implication was made that most Polish immigrants to this country in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were illiterate—certainly in English, and also in the several dialects of their native Poland. Colonel Francis C. Kajencki of El Paso, Texas, disputes the latter point. “They were mostly unskilled, true,” he writes. “But not illiterate. … A report of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service shows that, for the years 1899—1909, in which specific nationalities are identified, 65 per cent of the Poles were literate (based on a recorded total of 742,753 Polish immigrants, age 14 and over). The Polish literacy rate exceeded that of some other European groups, such as the Russians, Italians, Portuguese, and Yugoslavians. The relatively high Polish literacy rate is, indeed, a tribute to the peasants themselves, for they attained the educational basics under the most adverse conditions, when Poland lay torn among three partitioning powers that showed little concern for the well-being of a subjugated people.”